Homemade Chipwich

One day, I was planning on hosting a party, so I came up with the idea to try to make homemade Chipwiches for our guests. It couldn’t be that difficult, right? Make some cookies, make some ice cream, put them together, roll them in chocolate chips.

Super easy!

NOPE!!!

The making cookies part was really easy for me. Mainly because I didn’t do it.

I asked Cassie to make me some cookies, and she came up with a recipe that created cookies that were perfect for freezing. What I was looking for was something that wouldn’t become completely hard as a rock when frozen.

Even the making ice cream part wasn’t difficult for me. For that, I put in the work steeping the cream and milk with sugar and fresh vanilla beans, whisking into some eggs, straining into a container, chilling overnight, then churning (and I used a machine for the churning, anyway).

The next part was the tricky part, and the part that I totally failed with.

So straight after churning, I figured the ice cream would be just a little too loose to sandwich between the cookies. I was right, since it’s basically like soft serve at that stage. I allowed the ice cream to stiffen in the freezer for a couple of hours. It hardened up pretty well, but the issue I had was that, once I had the sandwiches assembled, rolled in mini Ghirardelli chips, and quickly transferred to the freezer, because of the timing of the freeze cycles of my sub par freezer, it took a few minutes before the cold air started blasting. This is one of the reasons why there are gums and other polymeric compounds added to commercial ice creams; they aid in maintaining structure over a wider temperature range.

The scene was a bit unfortunate, like a Chipwich masacre, but I tried to salvage it by letting them freeze for a while, then wrapping each tightly in (way too much) wax paper.

The results were ice cream sandwiches that had a little less ice cream than I had hoped and where some of the cookies became a little too soggy. They tasted great, though. Luckily some last minute scheduling issues made me have to cancel the event. Hey, I didn’t mind having these in the freezer for a couple of days at all.

I always appreciate the work, ingenuity, and sometimes engineering that go into things, but experiencing the work that goes into making these iconic little buggers really took my appreciation to a new level!