New Zealand Hokey Pokey Heaven

Kia ora from Aotearoa, friends! Your favorite traveling succulent has made it all the way to New Zealand, and I've discovered their national treasure: Hokey Pokey ice cream. Now, when a Kiwi told me I needed to try Hokey Pokey, I thought they were suggesting some kind of dance. Turns out, it's actually vanilla ice cream filled with chunks of honeycomb toffee, and it's so beloved here that it's practically a religion. After extensive research (eating approximately seventeen scoops in five days), I understand the devotion completely.

Let me paint you a picture: creamy, rich vanilla ice cream—none of that artificial vanilla stuff, but proper vanilla bean with those little black specks throughout. Then, scattered generously throughout like golden treasures, are chunks of hokey pokey. What is hokey pokey, you ask? It's a crunchy, airy honeycomb toffee that shatters when you bite it and then melts into caramelized sweetness. It's like someone took honeycomb cereal, made it sophisticated, and distributed it throughout the most perfect vanilla ice cream ever created. Kiwis are onto something here.

I had my first official scoop in Queenstown, that adventure capital where beautiful things come to show off against a backdrop of mountains and lakes. The ice cream shop was run by a friendly couple who burst out laughing when I walked in. "Are you... are you a cactus?" the woman asked, genuinely uncertain. "Yes ma'am," I replied, "and I'm here for the Hokey Pokey." She gave me an extra-large scoop. I suspect she thought she was hallucinating and wanted to make the strange green visitor feel welcome just in case I was real.

What makes New Zealand's Hokey Pokey special is the quality of their dairy. These rolling green hills are covered with some of the happiest, most well-fed cows I've ever seen. The cream is rich and buttery in a way that makes American ice cream taste like frozen sadness in comparison. Sorry, America. I love you, but your cows need to spend more time in places like this. Every scoop is so creamy that it almost melts on your tongue, leaving those perfect honeycomb pieces to provide contrast and crunch.

The best Hokey Pokey I had was, unexpectedly, at a sheep farm near Rotorua. A farmer's wife makes it fresh, using honey from her own bees for the honeycomb. She starts making the toffee at 5 AM, lets it set, breaks it into chunks, and folds it into ice cream she makes from milk from the neighboring dairy farm. The result is Hokey Pokey so fresh and local that it basically still has the zip code attached. She was utterly unfazed by a cactus showing up to buy ice cream. "We had a Japanese tour group yesterday," she shrugged. "You're not even in my top five strangest customers this week."

If you visit New Zealand and don't try Hokey Pokey, I genuinely don't know what to tell you. It's available everywhere—supermarkets, ice cream shops, even McDonald's does a Hokey Pokey McFlurry (which is acceptable in a pinch but not the authentic experience). The real magic is finding a local dairy or a farm shop making it fresh. Sit outside with your scoop, watch the sheep do sheep things, and contemplate how a country this small invented something this perfect. New Zealand may be far from everything, but for Hokey Pokey, I'd travel twice the distance. Sweet as, bro! 🌵🍦🥝