Ample Hills - I Contain Breakfast Foods

I Contain Breakfast Foods - Sweet Cream Ice Cream with a touch of Cinnamon, pieces of Chocolate Donuts and Coffee Cake Crumble

The next pint in my four pint shipment from the Ample Hills Creamery in Brooklyn is called I Contain Breakfast Foods.  It is only available as the shop-specific flavor for their location in Brooklyn Bridge Park -- and occasionally they make it available online.  This is the second breakfast-themed flavor in a row -- the first flavor in my shipment was Boozy Breakfast.  I Contain Breakfast Foods contains a sweet cream base with cinnamon, pieces of chocolate donuts (the breakfast of champions after all) and coffee cake crumble.  Looks good.

But I had to ask:  what kind of a name for an ice cream flavor is "I Contain Breakfast Foods"?  It turns out that it is a Walt Whitman reference.  Whitman's poem Crossing Brooklyn's Ferry refers to Brooklyn as having "ample hills" in its fifth stanza -- which is how this brand got its name.  So, when the New York Public Library was celebrating Whitman's 200th birthday last year, Ample Hills decided to create a new flavor to commemorate the occasion.  This flavor is a reference to another Walt Whitman poem called Song of Myself.  Near the end of the poem is a section that reads:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

... which has gotten a little bit of traction as an online meme.  It's difficult to try to interpret poems (and online memes), so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

On to the ice cream!  Removing the lid, I see a sizeable air pocket.  I always get a little bummed about this, because I feel like I could have gotten more ice cream.  It's probably not that much and it is also probably a fluke.  The base is darker than the usual sweet cream -- sweet cream is usually white.  It could be the cinnamon or that some of the color has dissolved away from the mix-ins.  The first spoonful is thick and creamy.  I do taste some cinnamon but I also taste some brown sugar and a little bit of chocolate.  At first the mix-ins are crumb-sized and numerous but as I dig my way down, I start to encounter larger pieces.  The larger pieces are quite soft and chewy.  The flavors of two cake-like mix-ins are not too strong -- I taste mild chocolate in the donut ones and mainly brown-sugar in the coffee-cake ones -- but they did blend well.

I liked this ice cream.  The breakfast pastry mix-ins were not too strong or distinctive but they blended well with the cinnamon in the base ice cream.  This is not a home run flavor for me compared to other Ample Hills flavors but it is still tasty.  If you are at their scoop shop in Brooklyn Bridge Park, check it out.