Snickerdoodle Sandwiches and Then Some
This post is dedicated to Jamie, of course.
My internal conflict is always the same whenever I go to Diddy Riese in LA: chocolate chip cookie sandwich with vanilla ice cream or snickerdoodle sandwich with strawberry ice cream? Chocolate chip usually wins, but snickerdoodle and strawberry ice cream is a great combination, so I thought I’d play around with it at home with a sorbet and a peach-ginger ice cream. (By the way, if you find yourself in LA with an extra $1, go to Diddy Riese, because that’s how much they charge for a good-quality ice cream sandwich, though you may have to have a friend drive around the block as you wait in line because parking is tough in Westwood… but do it anyway)
Snickerdoodles have long been a favorite cookie of mine, but I was often disappointed by recipes for them that didn’t understand that they should be light and chewy and sweet and cinnamon-y. It wasn’t until I happened upon this recipe that I found my foolproof snickerdoodle standby, but not exactly as written… I had 3.5 oz mascarpone cheese — instead of the specified 4 oz cream cheese — to use the first time I made them, and I think that still works out best — leaving them especially light and with just a hint of a soft cheese flavor, as opposed to a stronger cream cheese flavor.
In terms of understanding ice cream sandwiches, this was an interesting experiment. I’d wondered about which cookies would be best for sandwiches in the first place as well as which would be best to freeze and which would be best to eat right away. I’d assumed that chewy cookies make for the best ice cream sandwiches overall, and they could be eaten frozen or fresh, while crispier cookies could be eaten more on a lark, always fresh and probably open-faced. But chewiness is not always an indicator of what can be frozen successfully. The molasses cookies — full of a molasses, clarified butter, and vegetable oil — freeze beautifully; that is, they remain chewy and sweet. The chewy sugar cookies — maybe because of their high proportion of granulated sugar — hold up well enough in the freezer to be eaten right out of the freezer, but lose a little flavor. Biting into a frozen snickerdoodle, though — full of granulated sugar, butter, and cheese — is a wonderful way to lose teeth. If you’re going to make a snickerdoodle sandwich, make it fresh. And in general, I think that the snickerdoodles have a greater affinity for the creaminess of ice creams than sorbets.
Snickerdoodle Sandwich with Strawberry-Raspberry Sorbet. This sorbet didn’t really work. I had 2 pounds of strawberries that weren’t especially flavorful and a 1/2 pound of raspberries what also weren’t especially flavorful, so I hoped that maybe by combining them, and adding sugar and honey to make a sorbet at 28Brix, they’d go ahead and pop with flavor. They didn’t. It has a sharper strawberry flavor, but it just doesn’t taste ripe. I think that the color is very interesting, though, and the texture is smooth.
The sorbet overwhelmed the flavor of the cookie, too. It was a boring sandwich.
Snickerdoodle Sandwich with Peach-Ginger Ice Cream. This ice cream was great — so well rounded with creaminess, sweetness, fruitiness, spiciness, and chewiness from the crystallized ginger. I got the framework for this recipe from Casual Cooking with Charlie Palmer, but his included 2 cups heavy cream to 8 yolks, which seemed too rich to me, so I changed it to 1 cup heavy cream and 1 cup milk instead. I also had great ripe peaches from the Sonoma Farmer’s Market.
The cookie flavor came through a little better with this combination, but somehow the ice cream became more bland in the snickerdoodle.
Snickerdoodle Sandwich with Peach-Ginger Ice Cream and Strawberry-Raspberry Sorbet. I hadn’t anticipated the McDonald’s sort of hue to this combination, but it turned out to be the tastiest of the snickerdoodle experiments. Somehow the flavors melded together nicely, maybe the frozen components balancing each other out and allowing the cinnamon-y snickerdoodle to come through, too. I’d thought that the layers of sorbet and ice cream were too thick for the snickerdoodles, but they were just right to hold up to the thick cookies. It was like an ice cream nugget that worked.
I just spread a portion of the sorbet right out of the ice cream machine into a plastic wrap-lined 8×8 pan one day, and then the next day, I spread the ice cream right out of the ice cream machine on top. The next day, they were ready to be cut out with a cookie cutter and placed on a snickerdoodle. It’s sort of a slow ‘n lazy way that I thought of to make sure that the ice cream layer will be pretty even.
Molasses Cookie Sandwich with Peach-Ginger Ice Cream. This combination was pretty much born to be together, so it worked very well. I like those molasses cookies more every day.
