Ample Hills Creamery

Secrets and Stories from Brooklyn's Favorite Ice Cream Shop

Brian Smith, Jackie Cuscuna, Lauren Maelin

• Publisher: Stewart, Tabori & Chang
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781613125984
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Ample Hills Creamery is an ice-cream destination that attracts thousands of customers each day from near and far to Prospect Heights and Gowanus, Brooklyn. Lines wind around the block, spurred on by the chance to try one of their unforgettable flavors, and these and countless others will be dreamed up in kitchens across the country with the help of Ample Hills Creamery. Featuring recipes for the most sought-after flavorsincluding Salted Crack Caramel, Ooey Gooey, and the Munchiesthe book is organized by mood. Are you feeling nostalgic? Try a scoop of Black Cow Float. Or maybe you need a drink? Daddy's Sundae, made with bourbon, will set you right. For kids and kids-at-heart, stories, activities, and hand-drawn characters appear throughout each chapter, offering games, helpful tips, and inspiration for creating new flavors. With mouthwatering photography and charming illustrations, Ample Hills Creamery is a definitive, cow-filled guide for ice cream lovers and DIY enthusiasts alike.

WALT, WHITTY, AND PB race out of the park in search of the goblet! They stop suddenly . . . and stare out over Grand Army Plaza, with the Brooklyn Public Library to their right, the mighty Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch straight ahead, and beyond, Neptune lounging in the fountain pool. Walt doesn’t move. Uh-oh. Witty doesn’t move. He turns to Witty and PB. “Um?” he mutters.

Nope, they haven’t the foggiest idea of where to look for the goblet.

“The ice cream parlor?” asks PB.

“PB! Really?!” yells Whitty.

“We have to start somewhere,” Walt concurs.

“And I can get seconds, thirds, and fourths!” PB exclaims.

At the old ice cream parlor, the grizzled owner leans down low and beckons our merry adventurers with a tattooed finger. (Each finger is tattooed with a different ice cream cone. This one’s mint chocolate chip.) “Come closer,” he rasps. His breath smells of hot fudge and walnuts. Maybe pecans. His voice crackles and chugs like a freight train off the tracks.

“The woods. The deep, dark woods. Past the old pignut hickory tree. Through the sweet-pepper bushes. Talk to the ladybug. If she likes you, she might help. I saw it once. I saw the goblet. So beautiful.”

Whitty grabs Walt. “This guy’s nuts. One too few scoops up there, you know?”

Back to the park and into the dark woods go Walt, Whitty, and PB.

“Is that a pignut hickory?” Walt asks. “I think it’s a maple,” Whitty replies. They’re hopelessly lost. But PB waves them over. He’s sniffed it out. “This way, guys!”

They pull back the leaves of the sweet-pepper bush, and there, towering above them, are giant polka-dotted mushrooms. And perched atop one of the mushrooms, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, is a ladybug.

“Hi, ladybug!” Walt waves, stumbles, and almost knocks the ladybug off the mushroom.

“We’re looking for an ice cream goblet that never runs out,” says Witty.

“I’m busy,” says the ladybug, as she takes another bite of her sandwich. “Go away.”

Witty clucks, “But we need your help! This old man said you could help. Can you?!”

The ladybug scuttles away from them. PB sniffles. He can tell the ladybug doesn’t like them. And won’t help them.

Walt puts a hand on PB and pleads with the ladybug. “Please. We’ve come a long way. PB here won’t forgive us if we don’t at least try to find the goblet.”

“PB, like peanut butter? Peanut Butter the Pig!” the ladybug exclaims. “That’s my favorite sandwich. Not the pig part, but the peanut butter. I’m a vegetarian.” She holds up her sandwich. “See? I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” The ladybug flaps her wings and hovers in front of PB’s snout. “You’re so cute, I could just eat you up!”

PB blushes. “The goblet isn’t here,” the ladybug explains. “At least not now. It might have been here a long time ago, though.”

The ladybug tears off a large chunk of the polka-dotted mushroom and hands it to PB. And since the mushroom looks like food, PB does the only reasonable thing he can think of. He puts it in his mouth. “Wait! Small bites, PB!” she exclaims. PB spits the mushroom out.

The ladybug continues, “The top half makes you go forward. The bottom half makes you go back.”

“Back where?!” Whitty wants to know.

“In time, of course.” She blows PB a kiss. “Follow the peanuts, PB.”

“But how far back should we go?” PB asks. But the ladybug has vanished.

“Where did she go?” Walt asks.

“I don’t like mushrooms,” Whitty says.

“Just pretend it’s ice cream,” PB says as he hands Walt and Whitty pieces of the mushroom. “A little bite first? All together, on three. One, two, three—Here we go!”

Bananamon (this page) Nanatella (right)

BANANAMON

Long before Ample Hills was even an idea, this was Jackie’s other favorite flavor (besides Cardamom Bliss, this page). Summers at Trout Lake always included making this twisted ode to banana pudding. It’s a creamy banana-and-cinnamon ice cream, with loads of crushed vanilla wafer cookies in every bite. As with Strawberries and Cream (this page), we leave the egg yolks out of this recipe to allow the fruit flavor to shine through, and no eggs means you don’t have to cook the base.

FOR THE BANANA ICE CREAM:

1½ cups (360 ml) whole milk

¾ cup (90 g) skim milk powder

¾ cup (150 g) organic cane sugar

1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1¼ teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 pound (455 g) ripe peeled fresh bananas

2 cups (480 ml) heavy cream

1 (12-ounce/340-g) box or about 25 vanilla wafer cookies

1. Make the banana ice cream: In a blender, combine the milk, skim milk powder, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and bananas and blend until smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and add the cream. Stir until combined.

2. Transfer the base to an ice cream maker and churn it according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

3. Break the vanilla wafer cookies into quarters. Transfer the ice cream to a storage container, gently folding in the cookie pieces as you do. Serve immediately or harden in your freezer for 8 to 12 hours for a more scoopable ice cream.

TROUT LAKE AND BANANAMON

Jackie and her family have been vacationing in the Adirondacks for almost forty years, at a cabin community called Trout Lake Club. Jackie brought Brian to Trout Lake for the first time in the late 1990s. There are really only two reasons someone would get an invite to Trout Lake Club:

1. They are marriage material, or

2. They have a special talent or skill the people at Trout Lake will truly appreciate.

At that point, Jackie wasn’t sure yet about the marriage part. What she was sure of, however, was that Brian could produce some amazing ice crea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• BLISSFUL
• CURIOUSER
• NOSTALGIC
• NUTTY
• TIPSY
• SLUGGISH
• HEARTBROKEN
• INSPIRED
• PLUS ONE
• Resources
• Index of Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgement
• Copyright Page