Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

And speaking of ice cream... it's finally warm enough to eat it outside without freezing. This weekend for a bank holiday BBQ we went to we made ice cream sandwiches. Yum! I'm not a huge fan of the store bought ice cream sandwiches mainly because I don't really like the ice cream in them. I'm a bit of a vanilla ice cream snob and really only like sort of expensive brands like Haagen Dazs, which is my favorite vanilla. But homemade ice cream sandwiches seemed fun to make and, well, you can pick your ice cream, so that's what we did. I followed this recipe here. The pretty photos made me choose it over a few others I read, but there are plenty online. Speaking of pretty photos, I learned in food styling and photography class not to take photos at an angle like the one above (or usually not to), because then it looks like your food is sliding off the table, but that's one of the better photos I took so I decided to post it anyway! Do you have any thoughts on this matter in food photography?
I recently read a magazine where one article was a food spread and just about every photo had the food shot at an angle and each dish was slip slidin' away, or so it looked. It made me laugh and I could totally see why it's not the best angle for food. I learned that you should take the shots from directly above or straight on, but rarely at an angle. I digress! Back to the ice cream sandwiches... Lois helped of course.

The cookie part is easy. It's the ice cream and assembly part, which is a bit tricky, especially when a 4 year old is "helping." Following the recipe's instructions for store bought ice cream, I cut away the plastic container and sliced the ice cream in 4 slices (it wasn't Haagen Dazs by the way, but something Andrew picked, not sure of the name now!). I put the sliced ice cream on a cutting board covered in foil, which I had previously put in the freezer for a while. Gotta make sure that ice cream is really solid and cut quickly with a big knife!

After making the cookies, which we made in butterfly, heart, and flower shapes, I put the cookies in the freezer for a while just to be sure everything would be as cold as possible. And then working quickly we used the cookie cutters to cut the ice cream shapes. We sandwiched the ice cream shapes between the cookies, lining up all the edges.  

I wrapped them individually in parchment and put them back in the freezer. Only a few got a bit soft as I was trying to take photos of them, but otherwise they all turned out nicely. Lois wanted sprinkles around some of them so we added sprinkles to a few. 

Definitely have to work fast, as you can see from the photo below. It's ice cream after all. 

We have some leftover dough so I'll be making more of these. The cookie part of the recipe is great on its own. I'd be happy to make just those again. Here it is again if you'd like to make these too.