Blue Scoop Creamery

We have a short list of Orange County’s best homemade ice cream shops that becomes even shorter if you leave out stores headquartered in Los Angeles, such as Saffron & Rose and Wanderlust Creamery. Just down the street from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda’s Blue Scoop Creamery earns its place on our list by rotating through a collection of compelling original flavors – including some deliberate “just to be different” twists on classics – and enabling multi-flavor sampling at prices that aren’t completely insane. New flavors replace old ones in the lineup every week or so, each addition signaled with social media posts, with hints that small batch manufacturing limits the availability of new flavors to weeks rather than months.

Roughly 18 flavors are posted on Blue Scoop’s menu board at any given time, drawing from a list of ice cream and sorbet choices long enough to stretch down a hallway past its kitchen to its restrooms. Many of the flavors are at once self-explanatory yet compelling despite their simplicity – “Carrot Cake,” “Pineapple Upside-Down Cake,” “Churro Horchata,” and “Pumpkin Chai,” to name a few – while others require a little explanation. The oddly-named “Pistachio Watergate,” for instance, includes a Nixon-inspired ‘salad’ of crushed pineapple, pecans, and marshmallows, and is really unique in the ice cream world, while a “Golden Gurl” mixes Golden Grahams cereal and cream cheese frosting with a cereal milk cream cheese ice cream.