Home-made Ice Cream Sandwich

Recently I popped into my local Lakeland shop and spotted an intriguing tray in a corner - it had 6 indentations with square pattern for making ice cream sandwiches.

Now I really don't have space for another uni-tasker like this, so walked away from it, once that I'd noted the brand. Back home, I searched for the recipe for these, but it seems these weren't available unless you go and buy the baking tray. But a lot of other interesting recipes came up and I liked the look of this one, which has very good step-by-step instructions with photos.

Ingredients
113 g unsalted butter
100 g granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
65 g plain flour
25 g unsweetened cocoa powder
¼ tsp salt
1 litre ice cream of your choice

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 170 °C fan. Line a large cookie sheet with baking parchment.
2. Gently melt the butter and remove from the heat before it boils.
3. Transfer to a large bowl, add the sugar and whisk together.
4. Add the egg and vanilla extract and incorporate well.
5. Add the flour, cocoa and salt and mix in well too.
6. Scoop the mixture onto the baking sheet and then using a knife or better an offset spatula spread out to about 3 mm thickness.
7. Bake for 5 minutes, then turn the baking sheet around and bake for a further 5 minutes so it bakes evenly. It's ready when it looks dry on the surface.
8. Remove from the oven and carefully transfer to a wire rack.
   
9. Once the cake has cooled, take the ice cream out of the freezer and if it's hard, let soften a little.
10. Carefully cut the cake in two equal parts and transfer one of them onto a large piece of cling film.
    
11. Take the ice cream out of its box and cut about 1.5 cm thick slices. Place the ice cream slices on top of the cake which is on the cling film. Make sure to cover the cake up to the edges and leave no gaps between the ice cream slices.
12. Place the other cake on top of the ice cream and push down gently, then wrap the cling film tightly around the whole thing and place in the freezer overnight
    
13. When ready to eat, cut into pieces and serve.

I baked and assembled the ice cream sandwich last night and served to Lundulph after lunch today as a surprise. He quite liked it and so did I. I used rum & raising ice cream and it was very soft to begin with, so I didn't really need to leave it out, but just had to quickly wiggle it out of the box. The assembling requires preparation and you need to work fast, so that the ice cream doesn't melt too much.

Sadly, despite my smoothing efforts, the cake was a bit thick in the middle. Also it was quite crumbly and even though I was careful, it broke in a few places. I think I could take advantage of the humid air in the UK and leave the cake out for a bit - that might make it a bit soggy. I could definitely work on making the sandwiches more attractive. Rum & raisin was a pretty good choice and was really nice with the chocolate cake.

Possibly try out a few other recipes as well.