Ample Hills - Big Ample Circus

Big Ample Circus - Sweet Cream Ice Cream with Popcorn Toffee and Red Sugar Toasted Peanuts

I got another shipment from the Brooklyn-based Ample Hills brand.  Ample Hills is one of my favorite brands and it had been a while.  They introduced this new flavor Big Ample Circus -- which contains popcorn as one of its ingredients -- and I could not resist.   It turns out that this limited flavor is so limited that it is already sold out.  I'll still review it because of the unique ingredient list and I am looking forward to having the other three pints from their standard repertoire which are currently sitting in my freezer.  This pint is circus themed.  Red-sugar burnt peanuts and popcorn toffee.   I didn't know until looking it up that red sugar burnt peanuts was actually a thing.  That makes me more curious about it.  And 'popcorn toffee' sounds a lot like Cracker Jack or one of its variants (Poppycock, Fiddle Faddle, Crunch N Munch, etc).  This should make for a unique pint of ice cream.

Opening the pint, I am amazed by the bright colors.  The popcorn and the peanuts are visible right away.  The red sugar and toffee coatings are in liquid form and have run a bit (but not completely) into the sweet cream.  This tells me that the mix-ins were folded in rather than completely blended.  Digging in, the peanuts were indeed toasted (not just roasted).  The red sugar was syrupy rather than a hard shell.  I tried to make sure that there was a little bit of sweet cream on the spoon as well.  The popcorn toffee was interesting.   The coating tasted decent and was not crunchy.  I did not notice much salt which I guess is expected from a candied popcorn.  The sweet cream just served as a vehicle for all of this, but there was enough of it that I could taste it alone.  It is quite good.  It is quite soft and almost folds into the spoon as I scooped it.

This was a very fun flavor.  The mix-ins were quite interesting.  It is gone already, but it'll be fun to see if they bring this flavor back -- or some modified version of it -- for some fair-type of event in the future.