Ice-cream sandwiches
"The way we see it, everything is just an ice cream sandwich vessel waiting to happen." delish
This is an ad that I glimpsed on the side of a bus today, only I just caught a glimpse - mostly the words. So I didn't fully realise what I was looking at. I thought I was looking at some sort of crustless sandwich - a whole different topic that I might come back to some time.
But when I eventually found the ad - or a version of it I found that it was actually an ice-cream sandwich from Bulla, able to be bought in your local supermarket. In the course of my searching for suitable pictures and information I found a couple of interesting things - well more than a couple really.
To begin with there's that word - sangas - a truly Australian word. The English (or some of them) call them sarnies, in the north they are butties. Don't know what the Americans call them.
But back to ice-cream sandwiches. The Americans claim them as their own - they say they were first sold from a street stall in the Bowery in 1899, but it seems to be the 40s before they were commercially produced. In my youth they were made with Wall's Ice-cream. the sandwich was a slab of ice-cream - usually cut off a block, but later produced as the right size and sandwiched between two wafers. They were such fun to eat. You gradually squashed the wafers down as the ice-cream softened. As the ice-cream oozed out of the sides you licked it off until eventually you more or less just had the two wafers. Wall's is now part of the Unilever empire.
I think I always had vanilla. I was never a fan of Neopolitan, chocolate or even mixed vanilla and strawberry flavours. Ice-cream wafers, as we called them, were more popular than cones back then, but gradually the cones got better, and morphed into waffle cones, which are indeed much better, and they became the favourite. Now you'd be hard pushed to find a traditional kind of ice-cream sandwich. Or is it about to come back in a new and trendy form. Has it already?
According to the Guardian in 2016, in their survey on what will be big next year they were saying "Goodbye kale, hello ice-cream sandwich" and predicting big things for ice-cream sandwiches. And it does seem to have happened a bit - well you can buy them in the supermarket so they must have 'arrived'. However the modern iteration of the ice-cream sandwich is to sandwich the ice-cream - every conceivable flavour of course, between cookies. Well cookies are the most common, but the possibilities are endless. Just take a look at the delish site for 50 examples of what you can use and what you can do to decorate.
Bulla also make some suggestions of what to do with their sandwiches to tart them up a bit. That's one of them above. It's a bit like cup cakes isn't it? There is such a plethora of things to decorate with these days. You just need to buy some of them and then let your imagination run riot. Great for kids of course - the only danger being the ice-cream melting whilst you are doing it.
And whilst I'm on supermarket versions I found a rather alarming article in the Whitsundays Guardian about Coles' ice-cream sandwiches. Funny in a sick kind of way too. The grandson of a lady, threw a tantrum and threw his half-eaten ice-cream sandwich in the garden. The lady thought to leave it there for the birds, ants or any other creature that fancied it. However, it was still there the next day - unmelted (26 degree heat) and untouched by bird or beast. Worrying isn't it - and no real explanation was given. But this is a bit of an aside. If it worries you - investigate. I'm afraid I didn't pursue it.
In Singapore (and Malaysia) the ice-cream sandwich is a big, big thing. And there it is literally an ice-cream sandwich - i.e. the ice-cream is sandwiched between bread and sold from street stalls. It has become a local delicacy if you can call it that.
To my mind it doesn't look all that tempting. However, apparently it works. The bread is a coloured and sweetened bread. The ice-cream is either sliced or scooped on to the bread. You then fold the bread around it (like a hot dog or a sausage sanga here) and eat.
"The ice cream starts to melt a bit and the bread acts like a sponge and gets really soft and juicy… almost like if it was dipped in a milkshake." Follow me Foodie
The flavours are different too - with mango being a top favourite.
So there you have the cheap and cheerful street food, and supermarket versions - but, of course, the best is the one you make yourself and there are plenty of cheffy chefs out there ready to give you ideas - Nigel Slater, Yotam Ottolenghi, et al. Just google your favourite cook's name and ice-cream sandwich and I'm willing to bet something will come up. Here are some pictures of some really yummy looking ones.
Perfect for a hot day - though none of them look quite as easy to eat as my childhood wafers. Certainly not this one. I can see the whole thing disintegrating into a crumbly creamy mess. It might taste nice though. It's one of those on the delish site.
