Construct Your Own Ice Cream 'Sammie' With The Coolhaus Book
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What do you call a house built with a cookie floor and roof, held together with ice cream walls? Ice cream sandwich architects and Coolhaus founders Natasha Case and Freya Estreller call it a "cool house"— an ice cream sandwich, what they call a "sammie," designed by you and founded on two architectural premises: Bauhaus, a modernist design movement of the early 1900s, and the famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Building on the classic ice cream sandwich to construct one-layer, two-layer, and three-layer sammies, Coolhaus, an ice cream sandwich company with dessert trucks and locations in Austin, California, and New York City, mixes and matches cookie and ice cream flavors, designing crazy-good combinations for cravings that can happen anytime, anywhere.
For when those cravings happen, the Coolhaus Ice Cream Book, a cookbook of ice cream sandwich combinations that are named for famous architects and urban structures, teaches you how to custom-build a one-, two-, three-, or four-story ice cream sammie from the sticky ice cream foundations to classic and creative cookie flavors.
With its ice cream sandwich formula (cookie + ice cream = sandwich), the cookbook covers more than 100 recipes from classic, fruity, and boozy to "cakey," "cheesy," and "smoky/spicy." The authors recommend winning pairings like snickerdoodle cookies with cookies and sweet cream ice cream (named "Peter Cook-ies and Cream" for English architect Peter Cook) and oatmeal raisin cookies with balsamic fig mascarpone ice cream (named "Eric Owen Moss-carpone for architect Eric Owen Moss).
Other flavor combinations are more unexpected, like spicy pineapple-cilantro-chile sorbet sandwiched between vegan carrot cake cookies, and white chocolate and olive ice cream between double chocolate sea salt cookies — "We were inspired by Top Chef's Richard Blais' milkshake," the authors explain about the latter combination.
It's only fitting that the Coolhaus architect himself, Rem Koolhaas, has an ice cream sandwich named after him, although the recipe isn't listed in the book. "Rem's Coolhaus" is made with one double chocolate cookie and one snickerdoodle cookie with salted chocolate ice cream in between for the ultimate sweet and salty combination.
We asked the authors: What's the best way to tackle a two-, three-, or four-story sammie?
They say, "Share it! It's a fantastic first date idea. What's better than getting intimate over an ice cream sammie!"
Case and Estreller's Coolhaus Ice Cream Book can be purchased here.
Haley Willard is The Daily Meal's assistant editor. Follow her on Twitter @haleywillrd.