A Dinner of Two Sandwiches, Part the Second

Having eaten our toasties, I revealed that I’d been making dessert earlier in the afternoon.

Given that one of this month’s featured sandwiches was ice cream, and it’s the middle of summer here, it was perfect timing.

Icecream sandwiches are not the popular item that they are in the US. The whole icecream-on-a stick is a massive scene here, but not so much with the sandwiches…Googling around I found this, which seems to be only available in Western Australia, and then after some time I found the Monaco Bar, which is much more what I remember. Man those things were annoying. The biscuit always cracked or crumbled, depositing the ice cream in your lap, or on the ground. Or the ice cream all melted and dripped down your shirt, or in your lap. At a minimum, the biscuits were soggy and you got tooth freeze by having to bite into the sandwich. Much better to buy something sensible, and quick to eat, on a stick – perhaps a Chocolate Paddle Pop? So yeah, I was never a fan…

Fast forward to almost now. July 2016 and I was making fruit mince with a view to making mince pies for Christmas. You have to let it sit in the jar doing its thing for at least a few weeks, and Stephanie Alexander reckons that it probably lasts for years, but she’s never had enough to sample that. I was using her recipe, which includes suet (yay, fat!) which means you have to cook it, and I couldn’t use it for her mincemeat ice cream (boo, fat!). The recipe calls for apples, which you cook, a shitload of dried fruit and citrus peel, loads of sugar, and lashings of brandy. And the suet. Grated. Googling produces something that isn’t that recipe, but is pre-cooked (sheesh! weirdos) and probably won’t last so well. This blog talks a bit about making it, about half-way down the page.

Fast forward to now, well, Christmas Eve. I slacked off and bought shortcrust pastry, as it turns out that I can cook all kinds of things, but I’m a shithouse baker. Even with bought pastry, and bloody awesome fruit mince, I still managed to bugger it up. The crusts on at least half of the pies cracked and the insides began to haemorrhage. The remaining whole ones were rustic, to put it politely. I was initially sad, but then, as I ate a pie and drank a cup of tea, I started to think about what I’d do next.

Non-broken pies. I didn’t take pics of the broken ones because they were, well, broken. Not terribly photogenic.

I’d already had the seed of mince pie ice cream planted by Ms Alexander in her cookbook, so when I was googling around and found this and then this, I knew I was on my way.

Good basic vanilla. And it was on special.

I crumbled up the already broken pies, pastry and all into the softened icecream and refroze.

While I was waiting for it to freeze I looked around my kitchen and found I had some Pfeffernusse and some Pepparkakkor, so I thought I’d make some plain vanilla icecream sandwiches with them. Mostly they were a failure. It was 30,000,000 degrees in my house yesterday, and the ice cream just got too messy.

*sigh*

The icing on the pfeffernusse meant that the ice cream kind of squidged out from between the biscuits, rather than bonding with them… and it was just so melty!

They look OK…

The pepparkakkor faired better. They’re bigger and flatter, but still getting enough ice cream in to make it worthwhile without melting or falling on the floor or the biscuit breaking… I sense a theme.

Where they really shone, was with the mince pie ice cream. It didn’t really set hard, but I made some up on the spot and we shoved them hurriedly in our cake-holes.

We have a winner!

You can’t really see the ice cream in this shot, so here’s a close up.

Money shot

Chunky, fruity, boozy…what more could you want?

Crit

I’m a mother of two boys. I work selling organic produce to gullible locals, and in my spare time I run as far as I can. Oh, and I live in Australia, married to a US citizen.