These are the BEST ice-cream sandwiches I have ever had. My husband thinks I should sell them.
The recipe caught my eye in a 2016 Gourmet Traveller magazine, and I tweaked it a little and added a beautiful butterscotch sauce laced with ginger wine and served it as a finale to my 3 course dinner menu: - starting with Kimchi pancakes wrapped in lettuce with chilli soy, followed by wok fried salted pork belly and garlic stems served with the Chinese Cumcumber Salad and Celery Onion Pickle. It rounded the Asian meal off so beautifully. You could serve it with any cuisine though, change the ice-cream or the sauce for example - coconut ice-cream and a warm chocolate fudge sauce drizzle. Picture the salty biscuit balancing with the sweet flavour as we all love now, and whatever you like to marry with sesame and poppy seeds.
Pictured: Salted Peanut and Seed Biscuits as Ice-cream Sandwiches220g/1 cup brown sugar
60g softened butter
1egg, lightly beaten
75g /½ cup plain flour
1/8 tsp baking powder
70g roasted sesame seeds – place in a dry frypan for a few minutes on med heat- watch carefully as they will brown and turn all of a sudden. Remove and let cool on a plate.
2 tbsp poppy seeds
70g/½ cup roasted salted peanuts
Beat sugar and butter a few minutes until pale, then beat in the egg.
Add flour, baking powder and ½ teaspoon fine sea salt, and beat to combine.
Stir in sesame seeds, poppy seeds and peanuts.
Refrigerate until firm (1 hour).
Preheat oven to 160°C and line 2 oven trays with baking paper.
Roll golf ball sized balls of dough and place on the trays and press lightly to flatten. Make sure they are spaced far apart as they will flatten out even further as they bake. Especially if you are looking for nice round shapes and are hoping to use them for ice-cream sandwiches.
Bake 12-15 minutes, swapping trays halfway, until golden and crisp. Sometimes the under-side is a little sticky and undercooked, so I carefully flip them and give them a few more minutes.
Cool on trays for 5 minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.
Biscuits will keep for 2 days in an airtight container.
Serve as they are as they are already delicious, or serve as an ice-cream sandwich with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in between two biscuits – you can experiment with other flavours like coconut depending on what you served for the previous courses etc.
For an extra special dessert drizzle with some butterscotch sauce laced with a little ginger wine.
Makes around 25 biscuits - 12 ice-cream sandwiches
Pictured: Salted Peanut and Seed Biscuits