Blog

Melt Bakery: Peanut Butter Ice Cream, Chocolate Cookie

132 Orchard St, NY

www.meltbakery.com

For every specialty, New York has a producer who specializes in that specialty. Melt is New York’s first bakery dedicated to making ice cream sandwiches from scratch, and this is all they make – in an ever-changing array of pairings and flavours. On the day we were there, the choices were pumpkin ice cream with ginger cookie, vanilla malt with choc chip cookie, mint chip ice cream with chocolate cookie, cream cheese ice cream with red velvet whoopie cookie, or peanut butter ice cream with chocolate cookie. I went for the latter, and it was wonderful. The peanut butter ice cream was almost identical to the peanut butter ice cream we make at The Creamery, and the chocolate cookie was chewy and not frozen too hard. Easy to eat, and flavourful.

Dominique Ansel Bakery: Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, Salted Honey & Ricotta Cookie

189 Spring Street, NY

www.dominiqueansel.com

This was by far the most disappointing ice cream sandwich of the trip. And I thought it sounded so promising, too! I was particularly interested in seeing how the ricotta cookie tasted with salted honey spread on it. Well, I couldn’t taste the honey, and barely taste the ricotta. As you can see from the picture, it was pretty underwhelming to look at. The ricotta cookie was too dry and breadlike, and the ice cream a bit too sweet. There was lots of other interesting looking pastries in the shop, but since we have a lot of ice cream tasting ahead, we just stuck to the ice cream sandwich. Not recommended.

BKLYN Larder: Pistachio Ice Cream, Chocolate Cookie

228 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn

www.bklynlarder.com

We left Manhattan to visit this much-lauded general store and deli in Brooklyn, and it was well worth the trip. I’ll cover their gelato in my next blog post, but the ice cream sandwich we enjoyed – pistachio ice cream with chocolate cookie – was really lovely. It was the most chocolatey of the cookies I tasted, although my companions claimed this slightly overpowered the pistachio ice cream, which was olive green and tasted intensely of pistachios (not almonds or essences!).