Food Friday: Ice Cream and What to Do With It, Part 1 (The Chipwich)

I know. You’re reading that headline and wondering what the HECK is wrong with me, since you have never had any trouble putting away a delicious cone of ice cream, and why mess with a good thing?

Here’s why.

Ice cream in a bowl (or from the pint, if we’re being honest) can be so its-9:30 p.m.-and-I-can-eat-this-or-just-go-to-bed. Ice cream in a cone at the farm stand is lovely and wonderful, but sometimes it is just fun to exercise your creative side when it comes to ice cream, and elevate it to something you can truly call dessert. And calling things dessert is basically my calling in life, if you hadn’t noticed.

The Almighty Chipwich

I’ll discuss the base, chocolate chip cookies, another day, since there is SO MUCH TO BE SAID there, but basically you need no real recipe to make a platter of chipwiches today.

1. Bake your cookies. I will insist here that they be from scratch. Make them fairly small. Let them cool.

2. Scoop your favorite ice cream (I recommend vanilla in this case, but go crazy.) onto a cookie in modest amounts. (An overstuffed chipwich is a lot like buying a Betamax in the 1980s—it seemed like a good idea at the time, but you end up wishing you hadn’t.) Squish the top cookie on the scoop of ice cream.

3. Some might consider the chipwich unfinished without a roll through some mini-chocolate chips or some flaked coconut. I say that is gilding the lily, and I like my chipwiches as pure as, well, vanilla ice cream trapped between two chocolate chip cookies. So I quit there and put them in the freezer. (It’s a good idea to wrap them individually in plastic wrap, freeze them, and then unwrap them and serve them on a platter later.

And if one of those individually wrapped chipwiches doesn’t make it onto the platter, and you find it later in the freezer? It would PROBABLY be good with coffee when your children are napping.

I’m guessing.

Since I have LOTS to say about ice cream, yet I have two boys waiting NOT-SO-PATIENTLY to go berry picking RIGHT NOW, I will continue this series over the weekend. I can’t wait to hear how you make ice cream and other frozen treats extra special!

Next week for Food Friday? I have no idea, so bring it on—plan to post something you love!