What is it about New Englanders and their diehard love of ice cream? We just can’t seem to get enough of the stuff. So it makes perfect sense that Boston would be the host of the country’s largest all-you-can-eat ice cream event – the Scooper Bowl: the Jimmy Fund’s annual ice cream festival, held in Boston’s City Hall Plaza June 2-4. The fact that you can eat all the ice cream you want while raising money for charity makes a delicious event so much sweeter.
Boston’s All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival for Charity
According to Boston Magazine the first Scooper Bowl began, “in 1983 when the festival organizers milked cows on the Common and served ice cream to children who didn’t have access to farms.” It’s a far different scene today. Now it’s a three-day extravaganza with over 74,000 attendees and nine different ice cream makers scooping out dozens of delicious flavors such as Ben & Jerry’s The Tonight Dough, a kitchen sink mix of caramel and chocolate ice creams with chocolate cookie swirls and delicious dollops of chocolate chip cookie dough and peanut butter cookie dough. Or sample Yuengling’s Black and Tan, a swirl of rich chocolate and salty caramel ice cream. There’s some wonderfully crazy flavors like Hood’s Jelly Donut, which is vanilla cream swirled with raspberry sauce, donuts pieces, and sprinkles, and the perfectly named Baskin-Robbins’s Snacknado, a salty caramel-flavored ice cream loaded with chocolate-covered potato chips and pretzels, all swirled together with candy pieces and chocolate fudge and salted pretzel ribbons.
There’s also a full roster of musicians and DJs to provide musical entertainment as you see how many flavors you can sample.
All this yummy fun does a lot of good. The Jimmy Fund Scooper Bowl has raised more than $4.1 million for cancer research and care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For The Jimmy Fund, the Scooper Bowl is just the start of a wonderful summer season full of charity events that include golf tournaments, a radio telethon, and the Jimmy Fund Walk on September 27th.
Tickets for the Scooper Bowl are $10 adults, $5 children, free for children under three. The event takes place on June 2, 12-8 p.m., June 3, 12-10 p.m., and June 4, 12-8 p.m., at City Hall Plaza. Passes are sold at the event and at Walgreens stores.
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