Homemade ice cream sandwiches, worth the effort?

Bottom line, is it worth it to bake your own chocolate chip cookies from scratch and make ice cream sandwiches out of them rather than just buying them at the store?

Yes – big time.

So here’s what we did. Sam and I were sitting at his apartment, bored. We’d had dinner and decided we should do some kind of project since a) we were bored, and b) unlike with say sportswriting, we can actually go “create”* our own content for this site so why not do something for the site.

First of all, we made the cookies from scratch, simply using the recipe on the back of the Toll House chips bag. It couldn’t have been more simple, even with our lack of a mixer necessitating me mixing up the dough with my hands.  After the cookies baked, we immediately stuck them in the fridge in order to cool them down to a temperature where the ice cream wouldn’t immediately turn to soup on contact.

Once the cookies were reasonably chilled, after only 20-30 minutes I think, we started making the sandwiches with Breyers vanilla ice cream. Unless you’re working in a walk-in freezer, this step has to be done fairly quickly, because the melting ice cream will quickly make a massive mess if you don’t. Once we got the sandwiches formed, we stuck them back in the freezer to allow the ice cream to harden a bit and to cool the surfaces down again, this time so the chocolate shell would harden on impact.

Now, about that chocolate shell. We dipped the re-frozen sandwiches in a bowl full of that Magic Shell in a bottle stuff that, only later we realized, was full of all kinds of crap (like coconut oil) we’d prefer not be anywhere near our ice cream. If we really had time and space, I’d have liked to have tempered good, real chocolate to see if we could get it to solidify on the sandwiches. Putting that aside, the magic shell did its job here and, with another quick visit to the freezer, hardened well, both on the cookie and the ice cream.

The final product was outstanding, and definitely worth a couple of hours of baking and assembly. One thing to keep in mind is that unlike commercial ice cream, these concoctions don’t have any preservatives or stabilizers in it, which means they start to melt really, really quickly. They’re great if you keep them in a freezer, but I think they’d be awfully hard to transport around like for picnics or tailgates.

Anyway, give this recipe a shot yourself, maybe with different cookies or different flavors of ice cream and so on. The only thing I’d recommend for sure is to use real ice cream, not frozen yogurt or lower-fat alternatives. Reduced fat options met far more quickly and will make assembling these really difficult and turn your kitchen into an ice cream soup-filled mess.

* Brief “Inside the Writer’s Studio” moment: As a sportswriter, or news journalist, you can’t actually “make” events happen for site/page content. As a food writer, you can. I’m finding it much more fun that I’m not reliant on idiot football players to make news before I can create content.