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...

Latest Coyote's Kitchen Column!

Wow, has it really been a month since my last post? Um...I have lots of material...just not a lot of motivation right now. We'll see what the next few weeks brings me in terms of energy levels.

In the meantime, here is my latest food column in Bread 'n Molasses Magazine. Ice cream - just in time for summer.

Cadbury Mini Egg Ice Cream

In a fit of premenstrual pique last weekend, I purchased a 1kg bag of Cadbury mini eggs. It felt so evil, but they are so good! I just finished the bag off now, and let me tell you, it took considerable will power on my part to not inhale the whole bag within a day of purchase.

I didn't eat them all in their natural state, however. I had a brain wave during my PMS craziness: ice cream! Why not? I am out of store-bought ice cream and it's so frakking expensive here for the good stuff and the stuff I like that I'm not going to buy it. But it's cheap as hell to make, so make it I did! And the results were excellent!

Cadbury Mini Egg Ice Cream

2 cups whipping cream (35%)
1 cup whole milk (3%)
3/4 cup sugar
3 vanilla beans (I have a package I'm trying to use up because they're getting dry, so that's why I used this many)
1 cup chopped Cadbury mini eggs

This is my typical ice cream recipe (minus the mini eggs, of course). I just combine the cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla, really well in a large measuring cup, and pour it into my ice cream maker. Close to when the ice cream is ready to come out of the machine, I added the chopped mini eggs. Freeze till firm. And Bob's your uncle!

The shells turned the final product a bit of an odd colour, but that's OK. It tastes great!


I may need to buy another bag...

Magazine Monday #58...On Tuesday...Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding Cake

What do you do when you are viciously premenstrual and you just HAVE to have a chocolate, peanut butter, pudding, cake fix? You come across a recipe for Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding Cake in Canadian Living, while looking for another, unrelated, recipe, and you go for it!

The recipe is here.

I didn't use my slow cooker, but rather my nice old oven. Worked great. Here are the results:



And...I couldn't just serve it nekkid, could I? No! I happened to have the perfect accompaniment: Blue Bunny Peanut Butter Panic ice cream, purchased during recent cross-border shopping trip! As if there wasn't enough peanut butter & chocolate already!


This hit the spot, babies! Totally! The sauce created as this dessert baked could have been a tad thicker, but otherwise, this was a really, really awesome dessert. And half of it was gone 15 minutes after it came out of the oven...

Birthday Breakfast

Yep, it's a day to throw all dietary silliness out the window - I'm having ice cream cake from the other night for breakfast!


When I'm done this, I have to get cracking & pack for the lake, do some grocery shopping, hit the liquor store, etc.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Magazine Monday #43: Sour Cream Ice Cream

One of the best things about having a heat wave is that I can eat ice cream with less guilt. Currently, I have two ice creams chilling in my freezer: Island Farms Black Forest Cake (amazing, like all Island Farms ice creams are) and this homemade sour cream ice cream I made the other day, after the recipe for it caught my eye in the July issue of Gourmet.

The recipe is here.

I love sour cream. It's one of these things I could eat by the spoonful right from the container, but don't because that's not socially acceptable. Mexican food, for me, is a really good excuse to eat sour cream. Same with perogies.

So, how could I possibly go wrong with sour cream ice cream? Lightly sweetened, frozen sour cream that I can eat a bowl-full without any social repercussions or feelings of weirdness.

This is so delicious I can't even describe it - it's just too good for words. And it's really simple to make, providing you have an ice cream maker, which I do.

Just whiz everything in a blender, add to your ice cream maker, then let that miraculous machine work it's magic, and voila!
I used light sour cream, the 7% fat one, instead of full fat, and got a really good result.


To make mine a little more interesting, I added some chopped fresh cherries I had kicking around. Um, not my best idea ever. The cherries just froze and when I ate a spoonful of the ice cream, it was just like having chunks of frozen fruit to chew on, and this also affects the flavour of the cherries. So, I won't do that again.
Chocolate sauce was a nice addition, though, and I think the next time I make this ice cream, I'll add cocoa powder to it because chocolate & sour cream are really amazing together.
Enjoy!