Ben & Jerry's newest flavor: Schweddy Balls

Ice cream icon pays tribute to 'Saturday Night Live' skit

Ben & Jerry's unveiled its newest flavor Wednesday, Schweddy Balls, an homage to an old "Saturday Night Live" skit that features vanilla ice cream peppered with chocolate covered rum and malt balls.

The new flavor, rumored since June, will be available for a limited time in about 30 percent of stores that carry Ben & Jerry's ice cream, NPR reported.

The "SNL" routine it honors features Alec Baldwin, who plays Pete Schweddy, a guest on a fake NPR show called Delicious Dish who makes holiday treats like cheese balls, popcorn balls, rum balls and his famous Schweddy balls. The skit is an exercise in double entendres.

Baldwin, for one, is tickled.

"For a long time, I thought that ‘Here Lies Pete Schweddy' would end up on my tombstone," he said in a press release from Ben & Jerry's. "Now, thanks to Ben & Jerry's, the goodness of the Schweddy family recipe won't go with me to the great beyond. It is immortalized here, right now, and it's an ice cream. Ben & Jerry's and Schweddy. Two great names in American dessert, together at last."

Ben & Jerry's spokesman Sean Greenwood admits the whole thing is "just plain silly."

"We've always been a company that has had a sense of humor," he told NPR. Sometimes, he said, they spend time discussing serious business and other times "we just do fun."