The Clever Tip That Makes Assembling Ice Cream Sandwiches A Breeze

We don't often get around to making ourselves ice cream sandwiches at home. Usually, if there are fresh, chewy chocolate chip cookies to be had or pints of the best store-bought ice cream in the fridge, we consider ourselves content. Plus, ice cream sandwiches, while delicious, are both time consuming to make and messy to eat. But the Internet is ever-industrious and enterprising cooks have found a few viral tips to seriously hack the ice cream sandwich conundrum.

The messiest, most time-consuming issue when prepping for show-stopping sandwiches is the consistency of your ice cream. Cookies can be baked and cooled or purchased. The ice cream has to loosen up enough to be scooped up, spread out, or cajoled into shape by a cookie cutter before being placed between two cookies. It then has to firm up substantially again before you can eat it — otherwise you'll get more ice cream down your shirt than in your mouth. 

The good news is that you can avoid much of this hassle by cutting straight into a pint of frozen ice cream, paper carton and all. Yes, we're serious. As long as your knife is sharp enough and you use enough careful, downward force, you'll get perfectly round discs of ice cream that are primed and ready to fill a sandwich.

The best part about this ice cream sandwich assembling hack is that you don't have to let your ice cream come up to a workable temperature to whip it into shape. Instead, you want your pint of ice cream totally frozen. Choose your ice cream of choice, the possibilities are endless, but definitely stick with a pint-sized container (unless you have giant cookies around). Take the top off, lay the pint on its side, and cut careful slices all the way through. Because pint-shaped ice cream containers are usually tapered, this clever hack works well with homemade cookies that have come out of the oven ranging in size. You'll probably end up with 4 or 5 slices, just consider how thick you want your sandwich fillings to be.

From there, you can go ahead and start stacking your sandwiches together before peeling off the rounds of carton paper. A perfect sandwich will be revealed in a shockingly short amount of time. This is also the time to add any sprinkles, melted chocolate, chopped pistachios, chocolate chips, flaked or shredded coconut, or anything else your heart desires. Finally, you don't have to, but we would recommend placing your assembled sandwiches back in the freezer briefly to firm them up after being assembled by your warm hands.