lemonhead

ice cream sandwiches

ice cream sandwiches

serious eats

Made ice cream sandwiches for my b-day dessert. Tried out a new cookie recipe for the occasion, developed by Kenji on Food Lab. The cookies were a disappointment. The recipe had needlessly technical steps that didn't end up working, and the instructions had incorrect timing. Firstly, it took much longer than a few minutes to beat the eggs and sugar until they had a ribbon-like consistency. Secondly, the brown butter was still quite liquid-y after cooling in the fridge for well over 20 minutes. I proceeded with the recipe as written, but the cookies spread like crazy when they baked. Based on similar feedback in the recipe comments, it seems that the butter needs more time to cool, so that it's closer to solid when you add it to the other ingredients. Despite my grievances, the ice cream sandwiches were fantastic. It's pretty hard to be unhappy with an ice cream sandwich, at the end of the day. For future reference, I found one pint of hagan daz ice cream to be the perfect amount for making four ice cream sandwiches. It's best to assemble the ice cream sandwiches at least a few hours ahead of time so that the ice cream can re-freeze, and the sandwiches aren't a melty mess. If I make ice cream sandwiches again, I'll perhaps revert to the king arthur cookie recipe that I've been using. There's a recipe on sally's baking addiction that specifically makes cookies designed for ice cream sandwiches, in the sense that they're softer than most CCC recipes, and so won't get as hard when you freeze them. I'm not sure this is necessary; the cookies in an ice cream sandwich haven't been too hard in my experience. But this is something to consider, and maybe try eventually.

 

Update on May 11, 2026

At this point I've made ice cream sandwiches a handful of times, and have tried the following cookie recipes:

I would say that of the three, my favorite for the purpose of making ice cream sandwiches is Kenji's. While I love the King Arthur cookies served warm or room temperature, they do not freeze well. In ice-cream-sandwich form, they were hard and brittle, with muted flavor. The ATK ice cream sandwich cookies were an improvement. Even after being frozen, they remain chewy and flavorful. That said, I did not like the actual flavor of these cookies as much as other cookies. They came out tasting like tollhouse cookie dough, a little too chewy and sweet for my taste. Before getting into Kenji's cookies, let me first disclose that I tried his recipe a while ago and could easily be misremembering the details. As I write above, I did not have a good experience making his cookies. That said, I found that they worked well for ice cream sandwiches. Although Kenji's cookies are not engineered to be freezer-friendly, as the ATK ones are, they remain sufficiently soft after being frozen. This quality of theirs might not remain true if you adjust his recipe so that the browned butter cools and hardens more, as I propose in my initial review above. So perhaps what makes Kenji's recipe problematic for regular cookies -- namely that the overly-soft browned causes the cookies to spread too much, makes them appropriate for ice cream sandwiches.

 

I still do not have a definitive best cookie for ice cream sandwiches. I'm tempted to revisit Kenji's cookies to see how they compare to my memory of them. On the other hand, when I first made his recipe, I found it to be overly-fussy, and some of the steps inaccurately described. Those factors make me want to forge into new territory. Here are a few other recipes I may try in the future, both of which are designed for the purpose of ice cream sandwiches:

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