ice-cream sandwiches

w/ malted milk ice-cream, brown butter choc chip cookies

What I’m reading: Young Skins by Colin Barrett. I really enjoyed this - although I’m not sure “enjoyed” is quite the right word: this collection of seven short stories, based in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, is gritty and dark, featuring complex characters and devastating narratives. I couldn’t put it down.

What I’m listening to: The Kill List by Wondery on Spotify. I don’t usually go for true-crime podcasts, but this one had me hooked from the beginning.

What I’m eating: dinner with my mum and sister at Ken’s Exmouth Market (below)

Ken's, Exmouth Market

These ice-cream sandwiches were one of those magical recipe tests that worked out perfectly first time. Usually, there’s some degree of trial and error: you might have to re-work the mixture, tweak the baking time, adjust the ratios etc. The only issue I had with the first iteration was that they were enormous. They were comically large - pretty much the size of a burger. This is mainly because I only reduced the size of my cookies slightly (to take into account that one ice-cream sandwich includes two cookies). However, they still went down a treat when I served them at staff lunch last week - and I have a feeling they’ll be going on the menu somewhere quite soon.

The recipe is fairly adapatable: you bake the cookies, make the ice-cream and freeze it in a container - and then you can cut out the exact size disc that you need for the size of your cookies. So if you wanted to opt for a more moderately sized ice-cream sandwich, I would recommend reducing the size of your cookie dough balls to about 40g, then using a cutter that’s just slightly smaller than your final baked cookies. Or, you know, make some mammoth ice-cream sandwiches like I did - they’re pretty much guaranteed to bring your guests a lot of joy.

The cookie is my trusty brown butter choc chip recipe (version 2.3, which I posted here), and the ice-cream is malted-milk flavour. I used Horlick’s for a really quick way to achieve this flavour - think Maltesers, but with a slightly nutty, caramelly note that complements the brown butter cookies perfectly. You do, unfortunately, need an ice-cream machine for this ice-cream. If you don’t want to buy one (and I do think it’s a really worthwhile investment), you can also use a good quality store-bought ice-cream instead - or I can recommend JR’s ice-cream recipes, which use a pâte-à-bombe method, and therefore don’t require a machine.

The best thing about this recipe is that it is endlessly adaptable: anything is possible! I’m going to be testing a lot of different ice-cream sandwich recipes in the next few months, but once you’ve nailed the basic methods of biscuits/ice-cream, the world is your oyster.

recipe: malted milk ice-cream sandwiches