Star Ice Cream Sandwiches

Recipe from a Farm Girl Dabbles. She made her own ice cream, but I just used vanilla ice cream. This recipe does take a little bit of time to make because the dough will need to sit in the fridge and the cookies will need to cool before you make the ice cream sandwiches.

I cut this recipe in half and it made about six sandwiches!

Other Fourth of July Recipes: Fourth of July Red, White and Blue Potato Salad.

Ingredients:
Cookies
-1 c. unsalted butter, softened
-2/3 c. sugar
-1/4 tsp. kosher salt
-2 c. all-purpose flour
-4 T. cocoa powder
-2 T. (1 oz.) red food coloring
-1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
-red sugar, to sprinkle on top

First, soften the ice cream. Spread it onto a cookie sheet covered in wax paper.
Top with plastic wrap.

To make the cookies:

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat butter and sugar. Add in the salt and flour, mix -- do not over mix. Then add the cocoa powder and mix again. Add the food coloring and vanilla, stirring until red coloring is evenly distributed. Divide dough into 2 equal portions and pat each into a disc. Wrap each disc in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours.

Heat oven to 350°. Spray cookie sheets with cooking spray.

Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin. Roll to about 1/4'' thick. If the dough is sticky, just pick it up and pat into a round, flour your surface again, and roll out the dough again. With a small star shaped cookie cutter, cut out star shapes and place them on the cookie sheet. 

Sprinkle with red sugar. Bake for 11 to 13 minutes, taking care to not let the cookies brown. Let cookies rest on cookie sheet a couple minutes before removing to cool completely.

Once the cookies have cooled completely, cut the ice cream out with a cookie cutter.
It helps if you dip the cookie cutter in warm water first.

Put the ice cream on a cookie half.

Top with another cookie and serve immediately.

Put the extras back in the freezer right away.

These ice cream sandwiches were surprisingly easy to make, the cookies did take some amount of time, but mostly it was a lot of downtime. Sometimes when you make ice cream sandwiches and then refreeze them the cookies get too hard to eat, but these cookies stayed chewy after being frozen.

The major issue that I had with making these was the temperature in my house. It's been hot outside, but not hot enough to turn on the air conditioning, when I put the ice cream sandwiches together I put them in a room temperature container. Once inside the freezer, the air was still too hot and the ice cream from my remaining sandwiches melted. To fix this I could have frozen the cookies and the container first or I could have put the sandwiches in the freezer in an open container for about half an hour, before putting them in a closed container.

Aside from the temperature issue, these were delicious. I made the star shapes because it was for the Fourth of July, but when I make these again I'll probably make round cookies.