Gelato Petrini Cookies and Cream Cheesecake

Tim and Tom's Speedy Market recently started selling pints of Gelato Petrini, and after thoroughly enjoying their Cinnamon Espresso Chip, I was excited to try more flavors.  I recently picked up Cookies and Cream Cheesecake.  Here is the blurb from their website:

For this recipe we have taken two of our all-time favorites and combined them into a single showstopper that is even better than the sum of its parts.  Cookie and cream meets NY Cheesecake in a flavor that is sure to please the whole family.

Gelato Petrini gets it.  We are totally, 100% on the same dessert level.  How do you make cookies and cream better? Damn the consequences, throw it in some cheesecake! (Not that it needs to be better, you're delicious just the way you are, mmmkay cookies and cream.)

I ate this in two servings.  The first was a small-ish bowl.  Then I devoured the rest for dinner the next night.  I eat ice cream for dinner way more than I should.  I mean, what else am I supposed to eat when I get home too late to cook or am too tired to cook?

I'll be honest, the first bowl wasn't doing it for me.  I was disappointed because after thoroughly enjoying Cinnamon Espresso Chip, I was really excited to try Cookies and Cream Cheesecake.  I felt like it just didn't have enough flavor.

Turns out I'm an idiot and just needed to let it sit out on the counter for about five minutes before I started eating it.  It even says so on the container.  So, for my second serving/dinner, I let the pint sit for a few minutes before digging in.  This made a world of difference.

The texture was a bit thicker than the Cinnamon Espresso Chip, but had the same high quality.  It was smooth and pulled, but was not gummy.  The cheesecake base was really, truly a New York cheesecake base.  According to Wikipedia, New York style cheesecake 'relies on heavy cream or sour cream' and 'has a dense, smooth, and creamy consistency.'  I tend to thick of New York style cheesecake as being denser, richer and much less sweet than non-New York style cheesecake.  This gelato was no different.  It was sweet, but not as sweet as other cheesecake ice creams or gelatos and had that unmistakable cream-cheese-bordering-on-sweetened-sour-cream flavor.

This less-sweet base was the perfect choice here, because it allowed the sweeter cream from the cookies and cream to stand out from the base.  The cookies were not so much solid chunks of cookies as they were gooey clumps of milk-soaked cookie goodness.  Think somewhere between a cookie and cookie butter.  Again, the cookies were not particularly sweet.  The cream was a much-needed hit of sugar that brought a perfect balance to the flavor.  I think this flavor could have benefited from some larger cookie chunks, but this is a tiny quibble and more of a personal preference for chunkiness than a criticism against the flavor.