Fudgy Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

I'll admit that the first time I saw this recipe, I wasn't that thrilled with it.  After all, I can buy perfectly good ice cream sandwiches at the grocery store or at Costco, if I want a huge box of them.  And anyway, an ice cream sandwich is all about the ice cream, right?  So how much trouble do I want to go to in order to make my own.  As it turns out, though, they're not that much trouble, and they offer the distinct advantage of tasting good on their own, being storable in the freezer for months, and allowing you to use whatever kind of ice cream you've been wanting to try.  (This is chocolate-chocolate chip; I also made mine with a good store-bought vanilla, and it was better than the big box of sandwiches from the big box store.

First you melt some chocolate.  A ridiculously small amount of chocolate, as you can see.  So small that I thought the gram measurement must be wrong, but it was the same as the ounce measurement, and the volume measurement was so small it wasn't even given.  Well, that's not going to be very chocolatey, I said to myself, because I was still a naysayer as far as these cookies were concerned.

Mix (and sift) the dry ingredients.  I'm not much of a sifter, but even I could see that the lumps of cocoa needed some help.

Also a small amount of butter and sugar.  Why am I going to all this trouble to make a few tiny cookies?  I grumbled to myself throughout most of the cookie making.  It wasn't serious grumbling, just feeling a little put upon.

Anyway, I couldn't grumble that much because it didn't take very long to mix up the butter, flour and cocoa, egg, and chocolate.  It took even less time to shape a thin rectangle and put it in the refrigerator to chill while I went to the aquarium with the grandchildren.

By the time I came back, the dough was thoroughly chilled and ready to shape into cylinders.

Then force the dough into cardboard paper towel holders to make rounder, more even cylinders.  These go in the freezer.  At this point, all you need is ice cream.  Any time you want to make a few ice cream sandwiches, you just remove a cylinder from the freezer, slice it into 12 little pieces, and bake them for a total of 8 minutes.

 It takes even less time than going to the grocery store to buy them.  I think this may have been the point where I started to become a believer.

The last question was how they'd go over with the under-four set.

JJ:  "Sooooo good!"  He added a lot of extra o's.

Lily:  Words failed her.

My dream is to have a freezer full of baked treats so that I can just pull them out at the appropriate moment.  Cream puffs.  Cookies.  Cakes.  Pastries.  Once Jim discovered that the freezer was my secret hiding place, my stash dwindled to nothing.  I think these are safe, though, because they're still in unbaked form.  And, by the way, even without ice cream, they make perfectly lovely little chocolate cookies.  I'm a naysayer no more.