Make Ahead
Mojito Ice Cream Sandwiches with Coconut Macaroons
- Serves 10
Author Notes
There’s a lot of ways to fuck up an ice cream sandwich. A lot.
You can fuck up the ice cream and make it a chunky, icy, Breyers-y pseudo dessert. Get lazy on the whisking (and there’s a lot of whisking) or screw things up in the ice cream maker and you’re gonna end up with something that’s less a creamy, delicious treat and more a handy projectile weapon.
You can fuck up the cookie and make it too hard or too soft, and both are a disaster. You either end up with, again, a tooth-shatteringly hard cookie brick, or something that falls apart in a melty bullshit mess when you try to pick it up and shove it into your gaping, dairy-loving maw.
So what do you do? You use a cookie that’s good when it’s soft, but stable. And you use ice cream that’s actually fucking creamy. It’s not rocket science, it’s just common fucking sense: make it soft enough to eat and stable enough to stay together for the five or so seconds it’ll take you to demolish the damn thing.
Easy, right? You just have to avoid eating the cookies and the ice cream before you smash ‘em together. —Fresh Beats, Fresh Eats
Ingredients
- Ice Cream
-
1 1/2 cups
heavy cream
-
1 1/2 cups
whole milk
-
3/4 cup
sugar
-
5
egg yolks
-
1/4 cup
fresh mint (I just used a fistful of mint sprigs, you don’t have to get too exact with this part)
-
1 pinch
salt
-
1/2 teaspoon
vanilla extract
-
1/2 cup
lime juice
-
2 tablespoons
lime zest
-
2 tablespoons
cachaça (it’s some fancy-ass Brazilian sugar cane rum. You can use regular ‘ol white rum if that’s all you have, but I recommend getting the good stuff)
- Macaroons
-
4 cups
sweetened shredded coconut
-
1 cup
sugar
-
1/2 cup
egg whites (about 4 egg whites)
-
1 teaspoon
almond extract
Directions
- First, get yourself a large pot and pour in the milk, sugar, salt, and a half cup of the cream.
- Put the mint in and press it into the sides of the pot with a wooden spoon. You want to get the oils out of those leaves, so make sure you’re not gentle. If the leaves look like they were just on the losing end of a boxing match, you’re in good shape (in other words: bruise ‘em).
- Turn up the heat to medium and wait until it starts steaming, but don’t let it boil. Once it’s steaming, take it off heat, cover it, and let it steep for an hour.
- While that’s getting tasty, get a big metal bowl and fill it with ice. Pour the rest of the cream in a slightly smaller bowl and put that on top of the ice so it gets nice and cold.
- Once the hour’s up, put the pot back on medium heat until it’s steaming again.
- Get another medium-sized bowl and whisk the egg yolks in it, then slowly pour in the hot cream and whisk like a fucking madman while you do it, otherwise you’re gonna end up with gross, minty scrambled eggs.
- Pour the stuff back into your pot, put it (yet again) back on medium heat, and stir for about five minutes. When it’s thick enough that you can run your finger across the back of the spoon and leave a trail, you’re good.
- Next, pour it through a strainer into the bowl of chilled cream. Make sure you press that mint down again; you want to get every last bit of minty goodness out of those babies.
- Stir in the lime juice, lime zest, cachaça, and vanilla.
- Let the ice cream chill in the refrigerator overnight, then do what the nice people who wrote the instructions to your ice cream maker say to do.
- After your ice cream has actually turned into ice cream, stick it in the freezer while you get started on the macaroons.
- Preheat your oven to 350.
- Mix together the sugar and coconut in a big-ass bowl, mix in the egg whites and almond extract, and spread it out in a layer about a ½ inch thin (I didn’t do this, and that’s why mine look like someone just piledrived some cookies into a wad of ice cream).
- Cook it for 10-12 minutes until the macaroons are just a little golden brown, then take them out, move ‘em to a cooling rack, and let them cool completely.
- Cut the slab of macaroons into two squares, and put one square in whatever vaguely square-shaped container you have handy.
- Let the ice cream sit at room temperature for about five minutes, then spread the ice cream on the first layer of coconut goodness and top with the other layer. Y’know…like a sandwich.
- Freeze the whole thing for a couple of hours, let it sit again at room temp for 5-ish minutes, and cut into squares, rectangles, dodecahedrons, or whatever shape you fucking want. It’s an ice cream sandwich, not a freaking UN convention.
- Wrap them in wax paper, freeze them a little longer, and eat.
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