Carvel Ice Cream & Cinnabon

Having grown up in the South, my childhood was never terrorized by the raspy, croaking voice of Tom Carvel extolling the virtues of soft serve ice cream shaped into cakes resembling whales, or the scary, barely recognizeable Cookiepuss (allegedly an alien, but I call it good old fashioned nighmare fuel). But now I can enjoy the ice cream without the strange /​sad /​scary associations here in Houston! Yahoo!
I trotted over to this location after a UYE at Choo Choo Sushi across the street. This Carvel is paired with a Cinnabon (what unholy union is THIS?!), which makes it smell absolutely amazing inside. I rushed over to the freezer which held all the frozen ice cream cakes, and yup, there was Fudgie the Whale, available for purchase. Incidentally, Carvel only features a limited number of molds, and Fudgie the Whale becomes Dumpy the Pumpkin come October if he’s turned 90 degrees to the left and is decorated in orange and green.
After looking through the available treats, I landed on a classic. The Brown Bonnet, which is a cone of ice cream dipped in hardening chocolate sauce (a la Magic Shell), looks beautiful on the marquee – with a perfect coating of chocolate surrounding the swirls of the soft serve. My Brown Bonnet came back lopsided, flat on one side, and just plain ugly, after an inordinate amount of time. Looks like someone needs to go to the Carvel College of Ice Cream Knowledge. I requested a spoon and cup for when this endeavor inevitably went wrong, and it did after about six seconds after I dug in. It was quite yummy, but maybe not worth the dry cleaning bill for my now chocolate-​smeared jumper.
Thanks to its location a million miles away from any sort of civilization – erm, I mean, so far outside the Loop, I doubt I’ll be back in the near future, unless I get a bug in my ear to obtain Fudgie the Whale for my boyfriend’s birthday this year (I think I just like saying «Fudgie the Whale»). But I’ll take a page from Tom Carvel, and simply say in response to the experience: «Thank you.»