Ice cream sandwiches are the perfect dessert for a summer night with friends or a backyard barbecue. They’ll cool you down quickly, and you don’t need any utensils or dishes to eat them! It’s also a lot more fun to make them than buy the prefab kind at the grocery store (which probably contain way too many ingredients you can’t pronounce). Plus, if you make them yourself, you get to customize: imagine peanut butter cookies with chocolate ice cream filling …

Ice cream sandwiches are really very simple to make. Here are a few tips:

• Use a soft cookie. Brownies also make great “bread” for ice cream sandwiches, but any chewy cookie will do. If your cookie is too hard or crumbly, the ice cream will squeeze out the sides of the sandwich as you’re biting into it!
• Set the ice cream out at room temperature for 5 minutes or in the fridge for 20 minutes, so that it softens enough to be spread between the cookies.
• If you’d like to, you can make your sandwiches in advance and put them in the freezer (wrap in waxed paper or plastic wrap first). But they’ll be much easier to eat if you let them soften a few minutes before that first bite!
• Relax! It’s just an ice cream sandwich! You can make your cookies and ice cream from scratch if you want to, but you certainly don’t have to!

Ready to try ice cream sandwiches? Here are just a few recipes to get you started!

1. Mexican Ice Cream Sandwiches have a chocolate-cayenne cookie for a twist on the classic vanilla ice cream and chocolate cookie combo.
2. If you’re nuts for hazelnuts, try this sandwich, made with Nutella brownies or this choco-hazelnut recipe!
3. This recipe for soft chocolate shortbread cookies is perfect for ice cream sandwiches.
4. Kahlua and Irish Cream liquor make these ice cream sandwiches a grown-up treat.
5. Try Rachael Ray’s version, with squished-thin brownies.
6. Bakerella will introduce you to some very cool tools for making shaped ice cream sandwiches of any kind!
7. Panini Happy takes ice cream sandwiches (well, just the cookies) to her Panini grill!
8. For a totally different twist on ice cream sandwiches, try this Peanut Butter and Strawberry version, made on white chocolate pound cake slices.
9. You can never go wrong with chewy chocolate chip cookies as your exterior.
10. Peanut Butter Roasted Banana ice cream sandwiches combine a classic flavor combo in a new way.
11. If those weren’t enough recipes to get you started, hop over to yumsugar’s “Summer of Sandwiches” from 2007 to find 14 more variations, including ice cream sandwiches on puff pastries, chocolate-covered graham crackers, saltines, biscotti and more!

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