Because I both want to literally and figuratively run on a treadmill at the same time, I sometimes watch the Food Network while I'm at the gym. A few weeks ago, Guy Fieri was preparing his Christmas meal, and his dessert was an ice cream sandwich made with vanilla ice cream and ginger snap cookies.

(Sidebar: On Guy Fieri's cooking show, he has not one, but two refrigerators. Both of them are painted with racing stripes. In the background, the entire time, there was video of a guy doing that thing where you skydive with a snowboard. I think its called doucheboarding. The show should change its name to "WTF? with Guy Fieri.")

Guy Fieri's wankery aside, those ginger snap ice cream sammies looked delicious. MUST HAVE. I made them. Here's how you can. And just in time for all your holiday get togethers*.

Ingredients:

• 9.5 ounces all-purpose flour
• 1.5 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 0.5 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 0.5 teaspoon ground clove
• 0.5 teaspoon kosher salt
• 7 ounces dark brown sugar
• 5 ounces unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 ounces molasses (by weight, bitches)
• 1 large egg, room temperature
• 2 one-pint containers of vanilla ice cream
• Some regular sugar, fill a little bowl with it
  

*if you happen to have get togethers for Groundhog Day.


The recipe for the gingersnap cookies is by Alton Brown, not Guy Fieri. Because I'm going to be making lots of Alton Brown recipes, I have made the first leap into food preparation nerdiness: I have a food scale.

The food scale will make your life better and awesome. Get one. Otherwise, you do the conversion for molasses based on density to figure out the volume you need. I'm not doing it. I got a scale now bitches.

Start with the dry ingredients: whisk the flour, baking soda, ginger, cardamom, clove, and salt together in a medium bowl. Now set that aside.

Put the brown sugar and butter into your stand mixer that you should have. Mix (preferrably with a paddle attachment, although I did it with a whisk attachment cause I don't have a paddle attachment) until the butter and brown sugar are blended together and fluffy, should be 2-3 minutes on low (you made need to stop it a couple times and use your rubber spatula to push stuff out of your whisk back into the bowl). Next, add the egg and molasses.

Mix together on medium until it is nicely blended, about a minute.

Now, add the dry ingredients to the wet and fold together. You can do it with a spatula, but I got tired of that shit after about 3 seconds and just did it with my bare hands like an untamed man-beast.

Once that's done, its time to make the cookies. Scoop out about 3-4 teaspoons, and roll it up into a ball. Here's me doing it, and also scaring you.

Once the cookie ball is nice and round, plop it into the bowl of sugar. Avoid the sides of the bowl, as the cookie ball will stick. Just plop it right into the center, and then roll it all up in that sugar.

You should be able to fit about 8 to a sheet. You can do it on a greased cookie sheet, but I recommend you get some silicone baking sheets and put them right on there instead. I cannot recommend the silicone baking sheets highly enough. They are the fucking bomb.

(Thanks for the Crate & Barrel gift certificate, Selma!)

Once you got them all rolled up, put them in the oven at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. I like my ginger snaps less snappy, so I erred on the short side. No need to smoosh the balls out, they fall out into nice cookie shapes on their own as they cook. Once done, let the cookies cool on the sheet for about 30 seconds before transferring them to your cookie rack. You should have a cookie rack.

Now for the ice cream. Take the one-pint container, and lay it on its side. You are going to cut the container into fourths. Like so:

Cutting the container, rather than scooping out the ice cream, will allow you to get ice cream sandwiches with perfectly round disks that look like they came out of a machine. Nice, right?

The warmer the cookies are when you make the sammies the better. You should smoosh the ice cream between the two cookies to make the whole assembly solid. Then you'll want to wrap the sammies in saran wrap and put them back in the freezer to let it harden back up. Here's me enjoying a sammie.

Here's Yaworm enjoying a sammie.

YUM YUM.