Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

I have a lot of very specific PMS cravings, and the craving of this month was ice cream sandwiches. These things are so random and it's quite baffling at times. So anyway, I tried to resist this craving with all the willpower I could muster because when I have PMS cravings I tend to eat a large amount of that particular food, and who needs to eat a case of ice cream sandwiches? But my willpower only lasted so long, and after fuming about this for more time than I should have spent fuming about it, I popped down to the end of the block to the locally overpriced convenience store (henceforth known as LOCS) to purchase an ice cream sandwich. Or two.

Well, I'm not used to convenience store prices and one particular ice cream sandwich, made by Klondike, was $3.99. No way was I going to pay that, so instead I went with the more affordable Oreo option for $2.49. I bought two.

I heartily enjoyed both sandwiches - on different nights, I assure you. But while I eating the first one, I thought, man, I can make an ice cream sandwich myself and not have to put up with LOCS pricing at all! It does not take a brain surgeon to make an ice cream sandwich. You need cookies, you need ice cream. I can make both. So I did.

In the March 2012 issue of Food Network Magazine, there were a bunch of chocolate chip cookie recipes, and one looked like it would make good ice cream sandwich components: the cakey chocolate chip cookie.

I made this recipe. I wanted good, hearty chocolate chip cookies, but also soft ones that would be easy to bite into. I made the cookies very large - we would call these "bake shop size" in culinary school. I portioned them out using my #16 cookie scoop, which is approximately 1/2 cup in volume. I got about 12 cookies. I didn't refrigerate the dough as the recipe specifies, but I did stick it in the deep freeze until it was firm.

They were monstrous! But I didn't care because I wanted monstrous ice cream sandwiches.

While the cookies were baking I made vanilla ice cream with my trusty Cuisinart ice cream maker and my usual egg-less recipe that I've had a lot of success with:

2 cups whipping cream (35%)
1 cup whole milk (3%)
3/4 cup sugar
vanilla, to taste

Once the cookies were cooled and the ice cream set in the freezer for a couple of hours, this is what I got:


Pretty big, eh? Well, I wanted big and hearty, and that's certainly what I got.

And man, did it ever hit the spot! Excellent!

In fact, I'm going to go and have one now...