Ample Hills - Baked/Unbaked

Baked/Unbaked - Vanilla Ice Cream with Pieces of Housemade Chocolate Chip Cookies and Brown Butter Cookie Dough

Today is the next pint in my shipment from the Brookyn-based Ample Hills Creamery.  This one is called Baked/Unbaked.  At first glance, this looks a lot like one of Ben & Jerry's most popular flavors Half Baked.  A second look reveals important differences.  Ben & Jerry's includes cookie dough and brownies uses both vanilla and chocolate bases.  This pint, features a vanilla base and a mixture of cookie dough and (cooked) cookies.   A nice blog post from Ample Hills describing how they make this flavor is available here.  Let's check it out.

Removing the lid, I see the off-white color of the vanilla base.  I see a small air-pocket on top, but nothing major.  I see a bunch of the mix-in pieces on top as well.  Digging in, vanilla base is same one used in the last pint (PB Wins the Cup).  It is very thick, but also quite malleable, so it is ideal for folding in large mix-ins.  Soon, I discover these mix-ins.  The brown butter cookie dough is the easiest to pick out.  It is soft and chewy and tastes like buttery brown sugar as you would expect.  The baked mix-ins were more chocolatey than I expected.  There were more like small shards of chocolate with the occasional cookie crumb embedded into it.  It is hard to imagine it being a cookie outside of the ice cream but it actually worked really well paired with the cookie dough pieces since there is no chocolate in the cookie dough.

This is an interesting and solid implementation of a cookie dough flavor from Ample Hills.  Ample Hills loves do twists on put their own twist on classic flavors and they've certainly done that here.  This pint is heavy on the 'unbaked' half of its name. The brown butter cookie dough tastes quite good in this thick and delicious vanilla ice cream.  The baked half may not be what everyone expects, but it is successful at delivering good chocolate flavor.