These Should Be The Most Popular Ice Cream Flavors In Every State Slideshow

It's finally summer, and if you're like us, you've got ice cream on the brain. Unless you're in a particularly awesome ice cream shop, however, your options are sadly probably limited. Sure, some ice cream shops can have well over a dozen varieties, but far too few are doing things like incorporating seasonal ingredients into their batches, or creating special ice creams that taste like signature sweets of the state they're in. So we took it upon ourselves to figure out what should be the signature ice cream flavor of every state.

Wild berries, including blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries are abundant in Alaska, and we can definitely think of worse ways to use fresh wild berries than by turning them into ice cream.

Any drive through Arkansas will ultimately lead you to a restaurant that claims to serve the state's best cinnamon rolls, and there are a lot of them. There are a couple different ways to make cinnamon roll ice cream, but we suggest just chopping up some of the state's finest and stirring them into a fresh batch of vanilla.

Colorado is the health-conscious outdoorsman's paradise, so a trail mix-based ice cream would work perfectly here. How about a vanilla base with some cashews, pecans, raisins, dried cranberries, cinnamon, nutmeg, and M&Ms mixed in?

Strawberries are Delaware's state fruit, and what's not to love about some old-fashioned wild strawberry ice cream?

A fresh Georgia peach ice cream with a cobbler-style topping mixed in sounds very nice indeed.

Idaho is especially proud of its huckleberries — and why shouldn't it be?

The Hoosier Pie, which is actually as old as the state of Indiana itself, is made with sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla — which just happens to be the same ingredients as vanilla ice cream. So why not dice up some Hoosier pie — crust and all — and stir it into a fresh batch of vanilla?

You may be saying to yourself, "What the heck is a peppernut?" And we're right there with you. But you may know these little cookies by their original name, "Pfeffernüsse." German immigrants who immigrated to Kansas in the 1870s brought with them recipes for these special, spicy cookies, which are a staple in many Kansas bakeries. Create an ice cream that approximates the flavor of these — rich with warming spices like cloves, cinnamon, mace, cardamom, anise, and nutmeg — and you'll bring back childhood memories of countless Kansans.

Brown sugar caramel ice cream with a heaping pile of toasted pecans stirred in? Laissez les bon temps roulez!

Old Bay doesn't exactly translate to ice cream very well, so we're going to go with a dessert that's also very popular in Maryland: Smith Island Cake. It's a multi-layered yellow cake (sometimes with up to 14 layers!) with chocolate fudge icing in between each layer; to convert this into ice cream you can stir chunks of yellow cake into chocolate ice cream.

With more than 90,000 tons of cherries being harvested in Michigan every year, this one's an absolute no-brainer. Toss in some chocolate fudge while you're at it (an honor of Mackinac Island's famed fudge shops), and you're in business.

Mississippi mud pie is named for what Mississippi River tributaries look like after a rainstorm: muddy, brown, and dirty. But this famed pie's components — chocolate, pecans, vanilla extract, and coffee liqueur — would certainly make for a delicious ice cream flavor.

During harvest season, the area around Montana's Flathead Lake is packed with roadside stands selling some of the finest cherries you'll ever encounter. We like to imagine that at least some of these make their way into ice cream.

S'mores aren't an official Nevada dessert or anything along those lines, but there are a couple things tying this legendary treat to the state: its reputation for being a classic campfire dessert (and we imagine more than a few campfires have gone down here), as well as its reinvention as a "haute" Las Vegas dessert, at swanky restaurants like N9NE Steakhouse at the Palms. Chocolate ice cream with crumbled graham crackers and marshmallow swirls should do it.

New Jersey's Italian population has played a big role in shaping the state's culinary identity, and cannoli are arguably the most legendary Italian dessert. Vanilla ice cream with cinnamon, allspice, chocolate chips, and candied citrus rind, served with a cannoli shell on the side? Now we're talking.

The cheesecake is the signature dessert of New York City, and we think that the flavor profile of a perfect slice of cheesecake, with its sweet cream cheese and graham cracker crust, would translate perfectly into ice cream.

The chokecherry is North Dakota's state fruit. A member of the rose family, and is related to the black cherry. When ripe, they have a sweet, tart flavor that would pair perfectly with vanilla ice cream.

You might not realize it, but watermelon is actually a big cash crop in Oklahoma. Dairy is also its sixth-biggest agriculture product, so we'd love some watermelon ice cream made with Oklahoma milk.

An ice cream based on the flavors of this popular Pennsylvania Dutch dessert, rich with molasses, sure sounds good to us.

Benne Wafers are thin, crispy, sesame seed-based cookie/crackers brought to the United States by slaves. The Olde Colony Bakery in Charleston, home of the "original Benne Wafers," has been serving up this treat for over 100 years. We can see these being crumbled into vanilla ice cream for a very nice dessert.

This Appalachian creation is a stack of firm cake disks saturated with apple preserves and dried apples. It is most traditionally a wedding cake, and, according to folk wisdom, wedding guests would each bring a layer of the cake to the bride's family, which they spread with apples and stacked right then and there. "It was said that the number of cake layers the bride got determined how popular she was," reports Appalachian History. Cubes of this cake would incorporate very nicely into cinnamon-vanilla ice cream.

The area around northern Utah's Bear Lake Valley produces some of America's sweetest, best raspberries, and they'd make one heck of an ice cream (perhaps with some of the state's renowned raspberry blossom honey drizzled on top).

This custardy pie can trace its roots back to Virginia in the early nineteenth century, and even though it might not automatically sound like one that's easily adapted to ice cream (it's a pie filled with custard and a little cornmeal), we can picture this as frozen custard with some butter added for flavor, some cornmeal added for texture, and chunks of pie crust because YOLO.

Molasses (especially the sorghum variety) is so popular in West Virginia that there's even a festival devoted to it. Straight molasses ice cream might be a bit intense, so we'll go with the West Virginia stage cookie — the molasses cookie — crumbled into vanilla ice cream.

Believe it or not, Wyoming actually produces some of the best melons in the country! Come to think of it, cantaloupe ice cream on an arid Wyoming afternoon actually sounds pretty great.