chocolate ice cream sandwich cookies

If you ever want to make ice cream sandwiches, these are an excellent chocolate cookie. They're thin, so as not to overwhelm the ice cream, but they're chocolate enough to contribute flavor to a good pairing- I made sandwiches with the vietnamese coffee ice cream and it was mocha-licious. I've saved some of the cookies to try with the basil ice cream (coming soon) and with the mint. The advantage of ice cream sandwiches is that you can eat the ice cream without a spoon or bowl. No dishes!



I would advise freezing the cookies and letting the ice cream soften for a few minutes before assembling the sandwiches. If the ice cream is too hard it won't spread and if it is too soft it won't hold up thick enough to make a good sandwich. Once assembled, you want to freeze the whole contraption wrapped in plastic wrap for a while so that it becomes solid enough to eat. Otherwise, when you take a bite all the ice cream will squeeze out the far end like a bad jelly doughnut.



Chocolate Ice Cream Sandwich Cookies
from A Perfect Scoop
makes 16 cookies for 8 sandwiches

1/2 cup (115 g) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup (200 g) sugar
1 large egg at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 tablespoons (50 g) unsweetened dutch-process cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups (210 g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 350 and line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone baking mats. (It is important to line the sheets so that you can remove the cookies as soon as you take the sheets out of the oven, otherwise the cookies continue to bake on the baking sheet and become overdone.)

Beat together the butter and sugar in the bowl of a mixer until smooth. Beat in the egg and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the cocoa, flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir the dry ingredients gradually into the creamed butter mixture until completely incorporated and there are no streaks of butter.

Form the dough into sixteen 1 1/2" (4 cm) rounds. On the baking sheets, flatten the rounds so they're 3 inches (8 cm) across, spacing them evenly. You can get 8 on a normal 11 x 17" baking sheet with three going lengthwise down the sides and two in the center in between.

Bake for 20 minutes, rotating the baking sheets midway during baking, then remove from the oven.

cookie rotation

I found cookie rotation to the be the most boring of rotations. Generally, cookie baking is about assembling the right ingredients, not overmixing, and then not forgetting that your cookies are in the oven. It's also about knowing when they're ready to come out when you're not using a timer. Some cookies have complicated assembly procedures, but I found these to be generally more trouble than they're worth.

hehe: the 'broken' cookie broke when we tried to take it off the parchment paper.



These cookies are from the first week. From left to right, they are: chocolate decadence, hazelnut butter cookies, white chocolate walnut, and gingersnap.



Despite cookie rotation having a reputation as the 'easiest' rotation, we made a million stupid mistakes the first week- forgetting to double-pan the cookies when they went in the oven so the bottoms didn't burn, forgetting that the cookies were in the oven and overbaking them, etc. There were also failed cookies-- a marscapone/honey filling for a cardamom thumbprint cookie melted all over the pan-- and cookies that no one liked (except the chef, oddly), such as the trail mix cookies below, which contained many varieties of nuts along with golden raisins.



One of the assembly-required cookies was a shortbread and chocolate shortbread checkerboard cookie. I discovered that I like shortbread dough much more than actual shortbread cookies, and in this case, the chocolate dough is less good than the plain. These cookies required that we sheet the dough out thin, trim it evenly, cut precise strips with rulers, and glue them together with water to form a checkerboard log that we could then slice cookies from. Pretty, but extremely time-consuming.



You can also take the two kinds of dough, sort of layer them, and roll them up to slice cookies off. This results in a marbled version that tastes the same and takes about one-twentieth of the time.

For the last several days of the rotation, we made a 'cookie' that was really a cake petit-four, a chocolate-orange ganache layered confection. It involved a japonais, which is like a cross between a sponge cake and a cookie, and a sponge cake, and although our skills were not quite up to the task of these slightly difficult base recipes, we were happy to have moved on from cookies and we also discovered that ganache covers a variety of sins-- especially when spiked with liquor. This was a good transition into my next-- and final-- rotation: cakes!

nyt chocolate chip cookie

At least seven people mentioned this recipe to me before I got around to making it. The New York Times did an article on the best chocolate chip cookie, and this is their final recipe. What sold me on it? Sea salt.



I think what put a lot of people off making this is that the dough must sit for 12-36 hours. When people want cookies, they want them now. It's hard enough to wait the helf-hour to an hour it takes to make regular cookies. Who thinks of wanting cookies 36 hours ahead of time? I think that this is probably also one of the reasons that more people don't make bread: the rising time. When you realize that you want bread with dinner, you don't usually have five hours until then to put it together. But I digress.

I made these for a trip to a music festival at pemberton, in canada. An eight hour drive plus two days of camping seemed to me an excellent excuse for cookies, and as I was unemployed I had the time in advance to make them and let the dough sit for its 36 hour siesta. The cookies that this recipe makes are indeed huge and delicious. It's hard to finish a whole one on your own, but the variety of textures that the large cookie yields is worth the effort. Crisp on the outside and soft in the middle, it's every kind of cookie at once. And the salt on the top sets off the sweet flavors and prevents the whole thing from being overwhelming. It's the perfect complexity. Really, it's all about the salt.



Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Jacques Torres
Time: 45 minutes (for 1 6-cookie batch), plus at least 24 hours’ chilling

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons (8 1/2 ounces) cake flour
1 2/3 cups (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour
(I used all all-purpose flour, to no ill effect)
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 cups) unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons natural vanilla extract
1 1/4 pounds bittersweet chocolate disks or fèves, at least 60 percent cacao content
Sea salt.

1. Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.

2. Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate pieces in and incorporate them without breaking them. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.

3. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.

4. Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet, making sure to turn horizontally any chocolate pieces that are poking up; it will make for a more attractive cookie. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin.

Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.