El novio y yo took the friends out for helping us move. Mando had the great idea to go to A-Frame, which has the delightful honor of having Chef Roy (you know, of Chego and the Kogi Truck) as their head chef. The food was great but you know I was looking forward to dessert before we even ate…

There were two ice cream sandwiches: cherry oatmeal cookie with some ice cream — I didn’t look into the details once I saw “cherry” and “oatmeal” — so by default my friend and I chose the other one: Szechuan pepper cookies sandwiching ginger ice cream. Ginger cookies aren’t hard to come by, but ginger ice cream… now that’s different!

The cookie was sizeable without being too huge (sorry, no hand in the picture). The cookie, aside from being dense and moist, was definitely peppery! You couldn’t see individual pieces of pepper but you knew for sure it was there. There was a weird taste I could not put my finger on. The ice cream was not much to talk about; I think the cookie overwhelmed the taste of the ice cream, but not sure how it would have gone over if the ice cream was more flavorful. Or maybe I was just way too focused on what the heck was in the cookie I wasn’t loving…

• Taste: 7
• Crust and center moistness: Cookie got to be a little crumbly, but it’s hard to eat a cookie w/ a fork in the first place.
• Value: $6, which is like half an entree, so pretty good
• Overall: I would eat it again because I know I’m going to come back but I’d love to try some other things first. 7

A-Frame
http://www.aframela.com
12565 Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90066
310-398-7700

They’re open until 2AM everyday, but not every section of their menu is available all the time — their lunch menu stops at 3:30, they serve smaller plates until 5 or 5:30 which is when their dinner menu gets served.

After an awesome time seeing Robin Hoodwinked at The All American Melodrama Theater and Music Hall in Long Beach, we stopped by Funnel House to get funnel cakes. M and I opted for our very own ice cream sandwiches. Had we known how HUGE they were, we might have decided to share one, especially considering neither one of us finished hers. Out of their 10 or so flavors of cookies and 16 flavors of ice cream I got cinnamon sugar and white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies with mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Cinnamon sugar…

and white chocolate chip macadamia nut!

Did I mention this sandwich was HUGE?? It was huge both in diameter as well as height (please, no that’s-what-she-said-ing here). I had to hold it with my entire hand (rather than just the palm of my hand, it was so big and heavy). The cookies were room temp, but I believe they do bake these cookies in-house. The cookies were soft and easy to bite into and paired nicely with the creamy ice cream. The cinnamon sugar was kind of bland (not enough cinnamon nor sugar) but the white chip mac nut was ok. Not overly sweet, which is a great complement to the sweetness of the ice cream.

Funnel House
425 Shoreline Village Drive
Long Beach, CA 90802-4550
(562) 901-1835

• Taste: 8
• Crust and center moistness: soft
• Value: $3.75 for a MASSIVE cookie sandwich. 8
• Overall: It was way too much food, and that’s coming from ME. I’d probably want to share this with at least 2 other people if I were in the area, and would probably just take some cookies if I really wanted one. My friends weren’t too ecstatic about the funnel cake either, but everyone on Yelp seems to disagree with us, so it may have been an off day, which still doesn’t make a good impression on me because it shows inconsistency. 7

Good thing we got these cookies BEFORE we saw District 9, otherwise I might not have had an appetite. I don’t go into Ben & Jerry’s that often (tbh, I’m more of a Baskin Robbins and Coldstone type of girl) but if I knew they had cookies I might have thought about going in more often!

hmm.. maybe not. The cookies are supposed to go with their ice cream, but they sell them alone too. With how small they are, they are not made to make ice cream sandwiches, but rather be placed with the ice cream. Tbh, I was quite underwhelmed with these cookies; I had the person behind the counter microwave them for me and they definitely weren’t warm enough. They were on the softer side… not a chewy-type soft, but more like a not-hard soft; and the taste was ok. I have to keep in mind, though, that these cookies were meant to be paired up with ice cream — so the fact that they weren’t very sweet is actually a plus. I have an issue with the texture, though; as a “topping” to the ice cream, I wish it provided more of a crunch which would even out the creamy ice cream. On the other hand I’d be eating the ice cream and cookie with a plastic spoon so maybe that was their thought behind it. Based on these cookies, if I saw a Ben & Jerry’s while out randomly… I’d keep on walking.

• Taste: 6
• Crust moistness: soft
• Center moistness: soft
• Value: 6 bite-sized cookies for $1.67. $0.33 a cookie that is small and less than average in quality.. pretty good I guess.
• Overall: Not worth it alone; might be ok in ice cream. 6

I had a VERY nice, no-occasion dinner date on Friday. My very handsome (and very sweet!) date took me to a surprise dinner location: Yamashiro!! Above and behind the Magic Castle, this fancy restaurant provides CalAsian cuisine with a fantastic view of Hollywood.

So my dinner was great (black cod with wasabi mashed potatoes, yummers!!!), but let’s cut straight to dessert. I looked at the dessert menu and knew exactly what I wanted:

Ice Cream Cookie Sandwich
Warm peanut butter-chocolate chip cookies, dulce de leche ice cream, caramel & chocolate sauces, candied walnuts

It took not too long to come out and this is what we were greeted with:

Yamashiro peanut butter chocolate chip cookie sandwich

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that plate is the size of a normal dinner plate. The cookies were huge and thick, and tasted good. Not great, not the best cookies I’ve ever had, but complemented with the ice cream and caramel and chocolate sauces, the dessert (look at the size of this thing, shall I say “meal”??) was GREAT! The cookies themselves were not too sweet which was a good decision because the ice cream and sauces were bursting with sweetness. As mentioned above, the cookies were a mash-up of two of my favorite cookies: peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies! It is a DELICIOUS combination and the next time I make peanut butter cookies I must remember to turn them into peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. The cookies were very thick and not soft; they probably would have held the ice cream together if I picked it up (but I didn’t, since this was a fancy fork-and-spoon type of restaurant). Not crumbly or much too crunchy either. In between, good texture and stiffness for a sandwich. I loved dipping the cookies into the ice cream; they were strong enough to hold almost-frozen ice cream but the ice cream softened up the cookies to just the right amount. These cookies didn’t taste fresh; I highly doubt that these came from the restaurant’s oven. It would have tasted better if the cookies were warm. And it wasn’t peanut buttery enough. Overall, I’d get this dessert again, not for the cookies alone, but for the entire sandwich. Below I will judge the dessert in its entirety since that is the way it is presented.

Wait, the menu says the cookies are served warm. It wasn’t warm enough for me, it felt room temperature…

• Taste: 8
• Crust and center moistness: cookies were in between crunchy and soft
• Value: $9.99, 1/3 of what an entree could cost, portion was huge, good deal
• Overall: I would eat it again if I felt like indulging The only thing that would stop me is all the massive calories it has. 9!

The LA Times has this sweet article on tips for making your own homemade ice cream sandwiches. Some takeaways from the article that I thought were useful:

• The article says that the cookies should be less sweet than you would choose on your own because you’re going to be adding a BUNCH of sweet from the ice cream. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a cinnamon sugar ice cream sandwich, but it’s useful to keep in mind.
• Another thing I disagreed with is the point they made about choosing a slightly crunchier cookie to contrast the silkiness of the ice cream. I actually find it easier to eat an ice cream sandwich with a cookie that bends and then breaks rather than breaking. That could be because my teeth are sensitive though, and I want to avoid touching the ice cream with some of my front teeth which I’d have to do if I had two crunchy cookies. Again, preference.
• Cookies that include at least part brown sugar, molasses, honey or maple syrup will add a rich carmelized flavor to the cookies.
• Brown sugar helps to add moisture (and thus chewiness) to the cookie; some brown sugar in a sugar cookie would go great!
• Uniform cookies are a must! The dough should be placed onto the cookie sheets in nicely rolled balls rather than simply dropped.
• Premium (ie more expensive) brands of ice cream are better for making ice cream sandwiches because they tend to freeze more solidly than their private-label counterparts.

for the full story: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-icecreamsandwich1-2009jul01,0,5368389.story

Now if you don’t want to go through the trouble of making sandwiches on your own, you can find the Coolhaus ice cream sandwich truck and buy from them (think: Kogi truck, but ice cream sammiches). They even make disposable wrappers!!

What’s your take? My favorite fresh ice cream sandwich is right here in Westwood at my beloved Diddy Riese… freezered would be Nestle! With the chocolate chips on the outside What are your faves? You got any tips for me?