Ice Cream Sandwiches: Gingersnap Cookie and Lemon Ice Cream

I've always wanted to make my own ice cream sandwiches, but was intimidated. They're so cute! Plus, with homemade cookies of your choice and homemade ice cream in the wildest flavor you can think of, they'd be so much more delicious than the store bought ones. And so cute! Did I mention I think they're just adorable? The process of making them seems fairly easy, but is it one of those things that looks easy but turns out to be anything but? Well, I finally decided to give it a go and find out. Turns out it actually is quite easy.

Coming Soon!

Where do you take the pictures you’re going to put on your blog? I like to use natural light whenever possible. Sometimes that means taking my baked goods outside to the front patio to photograph them there. However, at times that can be TOO much light and the resulting photo’s are overexposed. Plus, the weather isn’t always good enough to shoot outside so all bloggers need to be able to photograph their items inside. My inside photo shoot spot is usually my dining room table. I even have a little clamp lamp set-up to attempt to get good photo’s when I have the time.

But, let’s face it. That rarely happens. Sometimes, you’re rushing because it’s starting to get late, you still have dishes to clean, and Thirty Rock is about to come on. Other times, you’re rushing because that dessert smells so good you can’t stand to wait one minute longer before you eat it! So having good lighting is a must. I replaced the light bulbs in my dining room with Daylight Bulbs that are supposed to look less like artificial light and more like the natural light all of us bloggers hope for. And my fiancé recently bought me a nice, new little camera that seems promising for taking good photos. I’ve been experimenting with different modes, ISO’s and white balance settings. I’m hoping to refine my blog photo-taking skills soon as the great folks over at CSN Stores (who have over 200+ online shops!) have offered to let me do a product review! I’m really looking forward to trying out one of their baking items and featuring it here on Ice Cream Before Dinner! Stay tuned.

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Ginger Snaps

June, which became Cookie Month at Sweet Melissa Sundays, is coming to a close. All of the cookie with the exception of the macaroons were big hits in this house. It would be hard to pick a winner amongst the other three - Honey Chestnut Madeleines, Pistachio Linzer Thumbprints, and these Ginger Snaps all are passed our test with flying colors. This was a great recipe to round up the month with! Nice pick, Gloria! (Gloria's blog is The Ginger Snap Girl so this choice was appropriate!)

I halved Melissa's recipe because I didn't want to end up with 4 1/2 dozen cookies... but I only wound up with 16! And I used a one inch cookie scoop like the recipe stated. Not sure what happened there! Maybe I scooped heaping spoonfuls of the dough. Knowing how good these cookies are, next time I'd go for the whole batch.



They are not super spicy like other Ginger Snaps I've had. I think they're actually quite mild, but the flavors are definitely still there. The only change I made was to use black pepper (I don't have white) and I reduced the amount called for by half. I also subbed in half cinnamon-half nutmeg for the allspice (I've still haven't picked up any allspice yet). I wound up chilling my dough almost twelve hours, so I'm not sure if that made any difference in allowing the flavors to blend together so nicely.

I didn't love how they looked when they came out of the oven. They got a little thin and ugly at the edges, so I quickly grabbed a cookie cutter and punched shapes out from the still hot and soft dough. It worked like a charm! (And eating the scraps was pretty great, too :)



I followed Jeannette's advice from the Ginger Snaps P&Q - to underbake the cookies slightly to get that soft-baked chewiness. Since the edges that I cut off crisped up, I got to taste what the cookie would have turned out like had I not underbaked them. What's really nice about this recipe is that the cookies are good both ways - slightly underbaked and soft, AND crunchy and crispy way.



These were absolutely delicious and didn't last very long. So good in fact that I'm actually tempted to make another batch right now and whip up some homemade lemon ice cream to make Gingersnap - Lemon ice cream sandwiches. :)
Thanks for hosting, Gloria! These were probably one of my favorite recipes from SMS so far! Be sure to visit the other bloggers' who baked along this week to see how their ginger snaps came out!

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Honey Pecan Madeleines

Little french scallop-shaped tea cakes, or Madeleines, are delicate little sponge cake-cookies made for enjoying with a nice glass of tea, preferably while you're sitting at a sweet little bistro table at a café in France. However, I'm not lucky enough to be in France right now. In fact, I'm cramming this post in in-between doing homework, writing papers, cleaning the house, doing laundry, and working. Not exactly like nibbling on madeleines while on vacation in Europe. But taking a bite of one of these yummy little cookies is enough to keep me going through completing my final paper. I can just close my eyes and pretend the research journals in front of me are actually the headlines of a French newspaper and that my desk is a café table in the French riviera. Ok, maybe they're not that good, but they're as close as any baked good is to transporting me to the Mediterranean.





Since hazelnuts are absolutely no where to be found in Central Florida right now, I used pecans instead. I couldn't find Chestnut honey either, so I subbed in clover honey. As you'll notice my madeleines don't have that traditional shell-like shape. I don't have a madeleine pan, but I did have some cute little star pans. When those were full, I baked the rest of the batter in mini-muffin pans.



That's Dan's hand helping me. :) These really were quite yummy. Pecans were a nice flavor, but I'd still like to try these again with Hazelnuts and maybe even Almonds, too. Thanks for the selection, Debbie! These are helping me survive writing my papers. Visit Debbie's blog, Café Chibita, for the original recipe mine were adapted from. And click here to see the list of this week's participants and visit their blogs to see their adaptations on Sweet Melissa's Chestnut Honey Madeleines.

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Chocolate Orange Macaroons - Coconut & Almond

Is it ever the case with you that you just know you don't like something? The thought of chocolate and orange together is not something that sounds good to me, though I can't specifically remember ever actually trying it. I've seen Giada make delicious looking goodies with this "classic combination" and singing its praises after tasting it, but in my brain the two just don't seem to go together very well. But, how often do we ever try the things that we just innately know we don't like? They say your taste buds change likes and dislikes every 7 years, so shouldn't we really give the things we think we don't like another shot every so often? I only recently discovered that I like coconut... So, why not give it a try with the chocolate-orange combo? Maybe I'll like that, too. That is exactly why I decided to give this week's recipe a shot.

Since I didn't know how I felt about them yet, I decided to halve the recipe. Since the fiance does not like coconut, I halved that recipe again and did some with coconut and the others with chopped slivered almonds (I got this idea from Gloria of the blog Gingersnap Girl! Thanks, Gloria! See her post here)

They were a breeze to put together. The longest part of making these was probably the chopping of the chocolate, which didn't take more than a few minutes.

So how did I feel about them? Well, it turns out I don't hate chocolate-orange. I don't think I love it either, but I definitely don't hate it. :) I liked the consistency of the ones with the finely chopped almonds. But, it turns out Daniel does dislike chocolate-orange, so those weren't a big hit. The coconut variety was good too, however, next time I'd try to maybe roll the lumps of macaroon "dough" into balls to avoid the straggler pieces of coconut from sticking out - those pieces got too crispy and crunchy in the oven and took away from the pleasant overall texture of the cookie. I'd like to give this recipe another shot with other flavors, too.

Chocolate-Orange Almond Macaroons:





Chocolate-Orange Coconut Macaroons:



Thanks for hosting this week, Ellen, and expanding my taste buds! See Ellen's blog, Blue Tree Green Heart, for the recipe. And be sure to visit the rest of the SMS bakers to see their take on this week's cookies. For a list of the SMS Bakers who participated this week, click HERE.

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Pistachio Linzer Thumbprint Cookies

The host for this week's Sweet Melissa Sundays is the gracious Tracey of Tracey’s Culinary Adventures. The recipe, originally chosen by Dawn of Growing Up (And Having Fun) After 40, was Pistachio Linzer Thumbprint Cookies. I'm glad this recipe came up because I've so often seen thumbprint cookie recipes I've wanted to try, but never had an excuse. Now, I finally had one!

These were a breeze to make - everything is done right in the food processor. I love recipes like these, especially when life is busy. While the cookies are in the over, all you have to do is pop the processor bowl in the dish washer and clean-up is pretty much done.

Since I already had a bag of pistachios in the pantry, I decided to use them... even though they were salted. I placed them in a colander, rinsed them with cold water, towel dried them and toasted them for about 10 minutes at 180 degrees to dry them. I think this trick actually worked out okay.

Due to a very busy week, I wound up chilling my dough for about a day and a half. I read that some other's had problems with it being too stiff and cracking, so I took my dough out of the fridge about while I prepared the cookie sheet, egg whites and chopped nut toppings. Thankfully, I had no problems with the stiffness of the dough. I also had a great little tool that made the Thumbprinting process nice and easy. It is intended to use in cake decorating - I've used it for making fondant flowers and such, but it really was quite helpful with these cookies.






In the middle of coating my cookies in chopped pistachios, I ran out of pistachios! So I chopped up some sliced almonds for the remaining half of my cookies. Also, since the fiance isn't such a fan of jam in his cookies, I filled about a third of the cookies with chocolate chips instead of jam... even though he isn't such a chocolate lover either. I thought the chips would get melty in the oven and that I could just spread them when they were removed. However, that wasn't really the case and I decided to pipe some nutella to fill in the gaps.








These were quite tasty - both the chopped almond & chopped pistachio coating worked well. And the chocolate-nutella filling was equally as delicious as the strawberry jam filling I used. The cookies were surprisingly soft. I thought they'd be very dry and crumbly like shortbread, but they weren't so much so. Thanks for helping out and hosting, Tracey! For the recipe, see her blog post here. Visit the other SMS bakers' blogs to see how their Thumbprint cookies came out. I love cookie month!