Ice Cream Sandwich Wafers For Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

Aug 18, 2019, Updated Apr 12, 2024

Why You’ll Love this Ice Cream Sandwich Wafer Recipe

Once you’ve made your own homemade ice cream sandwich from scratch, you’ll never go back to a store-bough box. My recipe starts with the best, fudgy homemade chocolate ice cream sandwich wafers. The texture is similar to whoopie pie cookies or soft brownies. You’ll love my no-fail tricks to fill and assemble them with ice cream.

What is an Ice Cream Sandwich Made of?

Ice cream sandwiches can be made from scratch in two ways:

Individual Chocolate Ice Cream Wafers: Bake a batch of individual cookies and use two to form a sandwich. This method takes more time and doesn’t look as tidy. Giant Cookie Cut After Filling (My Preferred Method): I love to bake one giant thin layer of cookie dough. This way I only have to assemble it as one giant ice cream sandwich and it’s easy to slice it up into perfect, even rectangles.

Top Tips to Make Ice Cream Sandwiches Easily

There are several pain points with making homemade ice cream sandwiches from scratch. That doesn’t mean they are difficult, just that you need to use a few tricks to make it a breeze.

Tricks for handling the ice cream sandwich wafer batter

Just use my two hacks and it becomes super-easy to handle:

Tricks for Handling the Chocolate Wafers

Once baked, the cookie base should be soft and slightly underdone. This yields a soft, fudgy cookie. Because it’s soft and thin, there is a trick to handling it without breaking it.

Once cooled to room temperature, pop the whole cookie slab in the freezer (still on the baking pan). After it is firm enough to easily lift it off the parchment, you can easily assemble the ice cream sandwiches it without any wafer breakage.

If the ice cream is too soft, it runs everywhere. Too firm and it’s impossible to spread. I solved this problem, too!

The easiest way I found is to simply cut open the container and slice the hard-frozen ice cream into slabs. Position the slabs over the bottom cookie, then smooth over with the same (cleaned) spatula you used to make the base. Warm it under hot water if needed. It’s considerably easier to cut open the ice cream container if it’s cardboard vs. plastic, but I’ve done both.

Tricks for Cutting the Ice Cream Sandwiches

To cut the frozen ice cream sandwich slab into tidy individual portions, dip your knife in hot water. If at any point the ice cream is melting too fast, just pop everything back in the freezer.

We’re using hot water and the freezer as cooking tools here, that’s all there is to it!