An Ice Cream Sandwich for Christmas
Ice cream sandwiches have always been the best ice cream treat. Grandma usually had an ice cream cake roll in the freezer, and those were good, kind of similar, layers of chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream. (Later, another Grandma would serve frostingless chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and though she was a very different Grandma, it connected the two in my mind. Chocolate cake and ice cream, the most perfectly Grandmaish combination to me.) Grandpa could sometimes be talked into sharing one of his Eskimo pies, which were always the kind without a stick where your fingers were chilled and covered in chocolate by the time you were done. But Mom knew where it was at. Mom would get me the ice cream sandwiches.
Oh, how I have adored you, ice cream sandwich. You come all wrapped in wax paper, 10 to a box. Sometimes you’ve been mistreated, allowed to get too warm and mushy or kept too cold and rigid. But sometimes, when you’ve been treated just right, and the cookie has some texture, but still parts under my teeth so the ice cream doesn’t squish out the sides too much, you can be perfect.
These days they make many different kinds of ice cream sandwiches. I’ve been down that road before. The disappointing cookies. The too-thick layer of ice cream. The lack of that perfect balance.
But it’s Christmas, after all. Maybe there can be a perfect ice cream sandwich at this time, in this place. Maybe we can have a Christmas miracle. Maybe we can take some gaudy Christmas cookies and combine them with the most Christmassy of ice cream flavors and make some magic happen. And if not, at least Mom’s table is the most perfectly Christmassy setting for us to try.
But what is the most Christmassy of ice cream flavors? I asked the internet. “Peppermint!” came the overwhelming answer.
Some, like our friend Crit, said Rum Raisin.
My answer? “Pishpash… Smishsmash… green gravy”
Of course then I went out and bought the brand of Pistachio ice cream that isn’t green
All of these were pretty lousy though. Nothing compared to the original. The cookies were bad store-bought sugar cookies, soft enough that they could have made a good platform for ice cream if not for the rock-hard icing. But the cookies were just bad, and no matter how wonderful and perfect the ice creams were, they couldn’t make up for my laziness in not making good cookies.
But what if someone were to make good cookies, something truly seasonal, not just decorated that way? And what if we chose the perfect ice cream to pair with those cookies? What if… bear with me here… what if my wife is way smarter than me and already had this all figured out?
“Let me make you some snickerdoodles,” she said. “I love those cookies, and they’re super Christmassy. I bet they’d make a great ice cream sandwich, with whatever you put between them. But if you used egg nog ice cream, I bet that would make the best Christmas ice cream sandwich possible.”
She was right.
Try to get the snickerdoodles while they’re still warm, before they’ve cooled and hardened (though they’re still delicious and perfect even then). Put a nice thick layer of egg nog ice cream between them, and you’ve got the perfect Christmas ice cream sandwich.
Merry Christmas everybody, a week late I know, and I hope to have one more sandwich post for you yet in 2016.
I like sandwiches.
I like a lot of other things too but sandwiches are pretty great
I said this on FB, but I’ll say it again here where it belongs 😉
I love how while we’re both speaking English, at Christmas time our languages are foreign. You translated ‘mince pie’ to ‘rum and raisin’ and I’m all “wtf is a snickerdoodle? And why would you drink a big glass of brandy custard?” I like the idea of Christmas cookies for this, but that they fail for the same reason my pfeffernusse did. Icing is a killer.
Oh wait, you said plum pudding, not rum and raisin. Still, you’re right, the mince pie ice cream lines up pretty closely, no?
Also don’t let me ever hear you talk smack about egg nog again, I’m quite cross now.