Ice Cream Sandwiches

I made these homemade chocolate ice cream sandwiches with vanilla ice cream filling for my husband's birthday. Normally he asks for chocolate cherry roulade, a rolled chocolate cake filled with cream and cherries, but I was happy to hear he wanted to try something different this year.

They're very easy to make, although time consuming since you have to chill everything between steps, but the results make them well worth the effort. It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference between a store-bought ice cream sandwich and the homemade version. The texture of the homemade cookie is somewhat crisp yet soft inside, and the ice cream just seeps into it to soften it a little more. Store-bought sandwiches by contrast have the consistency of a thin layer of wet cake.

The photos of the cookies did not turn out nearly as well, and I picked out the picture above as the best of the bad (it's a little better if you click on it and enlarge it, so that you can at least get some idea of the cookie's texture from its appearance). Since we ate the sandwiches at night after dinner, I attempted to photograph them at the same time. Since early morning and early evening light glares directly through the windows, I think it might wipe out some of the the contrast in a picture. Of course, using a white plate as the background for vanilla ice cream probably didn't help. It seems easier to get a good picture at about mid-morning, probably because the sun's overhead and helps to diffuse the light. At any rate, I'm trying to get some help so that I can understand how to take food pictures more easily and reliably in the future.