An ice-cream parlor is like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, only instead of the inevitable nuclear whitewater dinosaur catastrophe, you get delicious ice cream topped according to your whim. Today's Groupon takes you on a journey into the heart of flavor. Choose between two tasty options at Cold Stone Creamery:

• For $5, you get $10 worth of custom-crafted ice cream, drinks, and more.
• For $14, you get a 6-inch specialty or birthday cake (a $25.50 value).

This deal is good at Cold Stone's Largo, Maryland, location.

Cold Stone's ice cream, made fresh in stores every day, inhabits a quantum flux between soft-serve and traditional ice cream, with a rich, creamy texture that whispers tales of its super-premium quality as it glides over taste buds. The ice cream generously welcomes dozens of toppings, as traditional as crumbled cookies and chopped nuts or as quirky as granola and black licorice. Choose your favorite ice cream from among dozens of silky flavors, such as irish cream and butter pecan. Then make certain no one will try to steal a taste by topping it protectively with brownies, gumballs, and cherry-pie filling. Whatever Frankencream you create, it'll be scooped cold off the grill into a freshly made waffle cone or bowl. Cold Stone's ice cream and toppings vary among seasons and locations. It also offers sorbet and an array of lighter toppings such as fruit and honey. Ice-cream creations run between $4 and $6, depending on size.

If you need to accommodate eight average appetites, or just your own eight stomachs, Cold Stone's 6-inch round specialty or birthday cakes come in a diversity of deliciousness. The Cookie Dough Delirium blends moist yellow cake, sweet-cream ice cream, and numerous nuggets of chewy chocolate-chip dough. Other cakes include A Cheesecake Named Desire—an amalgamation of yellow cake and cheesecake ice cream on a graham-cracker crust—and the Cake Batter Confetti's mélange of red-velvet cake, cake-batter ice cream, and multicolored sprinkles, making it festive enough to buy in bulk and toss into the air on National Cake-Tossing Day. Cold Stone usually has top-sellers in stock, but it's recommended that jonesing sweet teeth call to pre-order an hour in advance.