These ice cream sandwiches are an easy summer dessert recipe. A soft and chewy tahini oatmeal cookie filled with a simple, homemade no-churn coffee ice cream, rippled with fudge that can easily be made with or without an ice cream maker.

This past weekend was my birthday and it was a perfect quarantine celebration. Instead of celebrating one day, I prolonged the festivities throughout the entire weekend, simply because I wanted to and what a great decision that was. Friday morning started with a bang when I released my very first e-book! (If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, what are you waiting for? Get it here!) I also finished up a little recipe testing and got some not-as-fun computer work out of the way in order to clear my weekend schedule. A friend and I picked up Shake Shack and picnicked in a pretty park, and Friday night, we threw a big blanket on our living room floor, stacked pillows around us, and transformed the room into the perfect picnic fort for the weekend. I made a bunch of random vegetables, we drank some funky natural wine, had a tiny dance party, and finished season 2 of Dead to Me. Perfect birthday evening.

Saturday morning, we made breakfast sandwiches with kale and focaccia and puttered around the house. I finished photographing a few things, we dropped cookies off to some nurse friends, picked up tacos and made a giant bowl of guacamole and snacked all afternoon. Also, all day long, I walked Martin through the whole sourdough making process, so we took little breaks to fold dough throughout the day. We made pizzas and drank a great bottle of Tempranillo and watched Center Stage. Sunday morning started with a breakfast frittata filled with all of the weekend’s leftover veggies, the baking off of our sourdough loaves, church online, and big lattes. Then we packed leftover pizza into aluminum foil satchels, tucked them in a backpack and went for a hike. We explored a little nature preserve about 45 minutes from our house, found five ripe blackberries, a bunch of wild fennel, and caught a couple of glimpses of gopher tortoises. We ate our picnic looking out over the water and it was just magical and really so perfect to be out of the house and somewhere that wasn’t a grocery store. Sunday afternoon, I drank pink wine in a bathrobe and took a nap and if that’s not living your birthday to the fullest, I really don’t know what is. We made easy pantry pasta for dinner and wistfully cleaned up our living room fort and I’m already counting down until next year. (I also realized that this entire birthday weekend recollection is essentially a diary of what I ate all weekend, but this is a food blog so I guess that’s allowed.)

how to make homemade ice cream sandwiches

So let’s talk about ice cream sandwiches. It’s Memorial Day weekend, which is the unofficial start of summer and even if we aren’t partaking in giant backyard BBQs right now, it would be wrong for us to keep ourselves from ice cream sandwiches. Often, homemade ice cream sandwiches made with cookies get so hard in the freezer that you almost break your jaw when trying to bite into them and that’s really not a fun way to eat ice cream. So for these sandwiches, I wanted to keep our jaws intact and I made a tahini oatmeal cookie that would resemble the soft cookie of an oatmeal cream pie. These hold up really nicely, just watch how long you bake them. I would recommend under-baking them slightly in order to keep them on the softer side.

I’m very much on an ice cream kick. Just prepare yourself because there are quite a few ice cream recipes coming at ya this summer, I just can’t help myself. This ice cream doesn’t need an ice cream maker. You just steep coffee beans into heavy cream, strain them out, and use your cream to make a creme anglaise. The fudge ripple is a simple chocolate ganache folded in after your anglaise is chilled and whipped and then the whole thing is frozen. If you’re not into making your own ice cream (I implore you to give it a try), you can definitely just buy your favorite from the store for these ice cream sandwiches too.