Ample Hills - Ooey Gooey Butter Cake

Ooey Gooey Butter Cake - Vanilla Ice Cream with Gobs of St. Louis Butter Cake Pieces

Today is the third pint of my four-pint shipment from the Brooklyn-based Ample Hills:  Ooey Gooey Butter Cake.  I had forgotten, but I have actually had this flavor before.  In the summer of 2016, I did an ice cream crawl of lower Manhattan scoop shops -- seven shops, twelve scoops and a cone in a single afternoon.  An Ample Hills kiosk in the Gotham Market was the last stop, so scroll to the end if you don't want to re-live the entire day.  It will be good to give the flavor the full-pint treatment and write-up.

Gooey butter cake originated in St. Louis during the 30s or early 40s.  The different origin stories floating around are not all the same but the all agree that it resulted from a baking mistake.  Either too much butter or the pastry butter was used and the cake came out flat and gooey... but surprisingly delicious!  So, a new product with a lot of local copycats was born.  Ample Hills has a cookbook which includes the recipe that they use.  This blog post reproduces that recipe online.  It looks like they may have tweaked the recipe recently.  Both the online recipe and my description from last year mention a cream cheese base while now the base is vanilla.

Cracking open the pint, a couple of the butter cake pieces are visible right away on the top of the vanilla ice cream.  They look a little like blonde brownies and are cut into bite-sized squares.  Digging in the cake pieces are chewy which is good -- sometimes frozen cake gets too icy or hard.  The flavoring is different from that of a blond brownie.  There's a lot of butter flavoring, but I can tell that it is made with yellow cake mix instead of brown sugar.  It is good.  The density of the cake pieces increased quite a bit once I got past the top layer.  This was almost like cake a la mode rather than ice cream with cake mix-ins.   The vanilla base was good, too.  I could taste the vanilla clearly even though there was a lot of cake.  I think the switch to vanilla from a cream cheese base was a good idea because all of the butter cake makes for a filling enough pint already.

This was a fun pint.  Gooey butter cake lovers should try this of course.  I see that Jeni's also has a version of this flavor, it would be fun to compare and contrast the two.