Kids scream for ice cream sandwiches
Aye carumba! It's hot out.
When you spend most of your day outside — at camp, at the pool, riding your bike with friends — you want to cool down fast. Come inside for a piping cold ice cream sandwich.
Ice cream is the perfect food for a hot summer day. It's cold and sweet and brings a creamy sensation to your mouth. My ice cream sandwiches combine ice cream with one of my other favorite foods, cookies.
I like making ice cream sandwiches with chocolate chip cookies, but you can make them with any kind of cookie you want, like peanut butter or oatmeal.
When making the cookies from scratch, use a cookie scoop (it looks like a small ice cream scoop) to make the cookies the same size. Also don't bake them too long or they'll get too crisp. You want them to be soft and easy to bite.
Now for the ice cream part.
We started with vanilla ice cream and added our own flavorings. We used mint from our own garden to make mint ice cream that we used with chocolate chip cookies. We used lemon zest (that's the thin outside peel) to make lemony ice cream that we put between two sugar cookies. You can experiment with your own flavors, but don't stir anything that's too chunky into the ice cream or it will be too hard to bite.
Make sure the cookies are cool before you scoop on the ice cream or it will melt. Now's the hard part: you shouldn't eat these right away. Wrap them in plastic wrap and freeze them for two to three hours so everything stays together.
A word from Mom: My family has widely different likes — that's why we started with vanilla ice cream. I can scoop one cup of ice cream into several bowls and let each person customize their own flavor (sure saves on buying four cartons of ice cream!). After you've stirred in the flavor, refreeze the ice cream before filling the cookies.
These can be made with light ice cream or even with frozen yogurt. After we tested the recipes we came across pineapple sherbet and couldn't help thinking how good it would be with sugar cookies.