This Finishing Touch Makes Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches Even Better

The ice cream sandwich has come a long way from its surprisingly boring beginnings. Originally a cold treat you'd buy on the street, it used paper as the bread instead of cookies or cake. The tastier incarnations that followed became a mainstay of many households. While you can find dozens of brands in a grocery store freezer, many people enjoy making this popular dessert at home, given how easy it is. Even giant ice cream sandwiches are simple to assemble using store-bought ingredients. Better yet, taking those sandwiches to the next level barely takes two minutes, thanks to a quick finishing touch. All you have to do is add toppings to the exposed ice cream on the side.

Incorporating chocolate chips or candy sprinkles gives more dimension to your sandwich's flavors while creating a nice contrast between the textures of each component. Provided you took steps to avoid making your homemade ice cream sandwiches a melty mess, the pop of color and texture you get from the toppings also just makes them look a lot more appetizing.

The easiest way to do it is to lay the toppings out on a sheet pan, and then just roll over them with your freshly assembled ice cream sandwiches on their side. Once the sides are nicely coated with your toppings of choice, pop the sandwiches in the freezer for a couple of hours to firm up before chowing down on them.

You can also give ice cream sandwiches a massive flavor upgrade by thinking about your toppings in terms of flavor pairings. For instance, if you're using a fudge cookie as the bread of your sandwich, studding the ice cream's sides with peanut butter and caramel chips gives you an even more indulgent combination. Using mint ice cream as the filling? Dark chocolate chunks bring sinfully good balance to the flavor profile.

You could also look to how other countries do it for inspiration. In the Philippines, asking for an ice cream sandwich from a street vendor will get you small scoops of cheese- or ube-flavored ice cream inside a split piece of pandesal, which is a pillowy local bread roll. The ube ice cream, in particular, would go well with toasted coconut flakes as a topping. In Iran, the dessert comes in the form of bastani-e nooni, which is made with saffron- and rosewater-flavored ice cream in between two wafers. The frozen dairy itself is sometimes topped with pistachios and dried rose petals, so those would be a natural fit on the sides of your sandwich.

This works for less-traditional ingredients, too. If you're swapping out cookies for baklava in your ice cream sandwich, for example, you can try using tangy dried citrus or berries to balance out the sweetness. You could also amplify the flavor of the nuts in the baklava itself by using more as the topping, but chopped more roughly to create textural contrast.