Two Ice Cream Experiments

I saw two interesting ideas on Pinterest regarding ice cream: one on how to make easy ice cream sandwiches, and another on how to make one-ingredient ice cream. I decided to give them both a try. Here’s a picture of the sandwich process. Seems simple enough. So I made some cookies, got a couple of pints of ice cream, and set to cutting them.

Not easy. A machete would have been convenient, but even my freshly sharpened chef’s knife had trouble with the initial cut. The ice cream starts melting because your hand is holding down the pint. Sharp knife, good cutting board, quick motion: required. Tastiness aside, these are quick, but it’s not as easy to cut a pint of frozen ice cream as it seems.

Verdict: Tastes great (duh) but looks ugly. You may as well crumble cookies into a bowl of ice cream, for the effort. Unless you’re trying to impress someone with your frozen dessert assembly skills, this works fine. (And you can probably find a better way to impress someone that smooshing ice cream between cookies, let’s be honest. The kid in me just wanted to play with dessert here.) Store-bought cookies are uniformly round and thus more

attractive. To achieve perfection in this silly venture, the cookies should be the same size as a slice from a pint of ice cream. If this easy method is your style, buy some perfectly round, medium-sized cookies, and you’ll be fine. Also, I used a creamier Blue Bell ice cream and a firmer Ben & Jerry’s blended ice cream. The creamier one melted so fast that I had a mess, but the blended version held up well.

Also, they’re enormous. That’s a serious slice of ice cream. I can only eat half of one of these sandwiches at a time, and even that’s a stretch. Next time I think I’m going make them layered in a pan and cut them in squares. Or, these Chocolate-Dipped Homemade Peanut Butter Oreo Mocha Ice Cream Sandwiches. They certainly take more effort than the Pinterest cheater style, but wow.

Second, I followed the most simple recipe I’ve ever seen. This is it:

Cut up a bunch of bananas into small pieces, lay them on a tray, and stick them in the freezer for two hours. Then toss them in a food processor and let it run until you have a gelato consistency.

Verdict: This works. It’s easy, guilt-free, etc. But you really must love bananas. I threw in some dark chocolate/peanut butter spread, and it tastes like a peanut butter/banana sandwich. I think it would be better with strawberries instead of peanut butter, but it’s simple and the consistency is surprisingly gelato-like. This is a keeper.