last taste of summer

ginger shortbread cookies with watermelon
and crenshaw melon sorbets

I've been hankering to make some ice cream sandwiches all summer, so I figured I had to do it this Labor Day weekend before the summer officially ended.

I wanted to use a crispy cookie just to see if I would enjoy it as much as I enjoy a traditional soft cookie. If I had made the cookie a bit thinner, I think it would have been enormously successful. Also, the cookie recipe called for crystallized ginger. I wish I had grated in fresh ginger because the crystallized ginger just wasn't intense enough for me. The sorbets, though, turned out beautifully---smooth and sweet with intense melon flavor.

chocolate gingersnap cookies with strawberry ice cream

These cookies were INSANELY delicious---chewy and spicy and dotted with chunks of melting semi-sweet chocolate.

I decide to stuff the cookies with strawberry ice cream. One problem, though. I don't like fruit-flavored ice creams because they always end up tasting, well, flavored and not truly like fruit. I would much rather eat a sorbet. But strawberry ice cream is a difficult flavor to abandon because it is part of the HOLY TRINITY OF ICE CREAM.

Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. Or as it is sometimes labeled, Neapolitan.

When I was a kid, my parents used to buy a gallon tub of Neapolitan from Pathmark called "Whale of a Pail." Back then, that neon-colored strawberry was my favorite flavor. Partly out of sentimentality and partly because of the flavor's universal appeal, I decided to give strawberry ice cream another chance.

I went with a base recipe that used cornstarch instead of eggs as the thickening agent because I was hoping that the strawberry flavor would be stronger that way. The end product was good but not intensely strawberry enough even though I tripled the amount of strawberry puree the recipe called for. Arg. At least I have the cookies to drown my disappointment in.