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Chocolate Ice-cream Sandwich with Almond-flavored Macaron Shell
(c) Discover Paris!

The ice-cream sandwich is one of the joys of childhood. I remember carefully peeling off the wrapper of this frozen treat and biting through its chocolate wafers into sweet vanilla ice cream. Sometimes the ice cream at the edges of the sandwich would squeeze out, whereupon I would nibble at the ice cream exposed there. Sometimes, if the ice cream was soft enough, I could lick some of it out from between the wafers, leaving the thick sandwich with a smooth, deep groove around the edges. However I ate it, the sandwich was a scrumptious delight and fun to eat!

Always looking for new products to propose to her customers, Marie at Mococha (89, rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement) has begun selling ice-cream and sorbet sandwiches as a novel feature this year. The refrigerated display case is located right at the front window, where she can scoop out the ice cream (or sorbet) and make the confection on the spot. She offers twelve different frozen dessert flavors. A scoop of any of them can be combined with six different flavors of macaron shells, permitting a wide variety of sandwiches from which to select.

Marie sells two types of sandwiches: open-faced (a scoop of frozen dessert sitting on a single shell) and standard (a scoop of frozen dessert pressed between two shells).

Two Open-faced Sorbet Sandwiches
On left: apricot with strawberry-violet-flavored macaron shell
On right: rose-lychee with almond-flavored macaron shell
(c) Discover Paris!

I stopped by her shop to try her open-faced sorbet sandwiches. Upon hearing that I would not eat the sandwich immediately, she placed the scoops of sorbet in a plastic cup and the macaron shells in a small bag. I was to take them home quickly (before the sorbet softened) and assemble and eat them there. I purchased the fixings for two open-faced sandwiches: one scoop of apricot sorbet to be combined with a strawberry-violet-flavored shell, and one scoop of rose-lychee sorbet to be combined with an almond-flavored shell.

Upon tasting the open-faced sandwiches, my partner and I enjoyed the flavors, especially the delicate rose-lychee sorbet. We found, however, the macaron shells to be rather difficult to bite into. Macaron is normally a tender, fragile cookie. Marie later explained that the macarons that she uses for her sandwiches are specially made to resist the melting frozen dessert. A regular macaron would quickly disintegrate when in contact with ice cream or sorbet.

The following day I was determined to try the standard ice-cream sandwich. I purchased a scoop of salted-caramel ice cream, to be sandwiched between two pistachio-flavored macaron shells; and a scoop of chocolate ice cream, to be sandwiched between two almond-flavored macaron shells. Taking the ingredients home, we immediately assembled them into sandwiches and tasted them.

Salted-caramel Ice-cream Sandwich with Pistachio-flavored Macaron Shell
(c) Discover Paris!

As before, we enjoyed the flavors of the ice cream and the macaron shells, but we found the shells difficult to bite into. During the process of biting, they squeezed together, forcing the ice cream out at the edges of the sandwich, where it fell into the plate. We were not, of course, testing under ideal conditions. The ideal condition would be to have Marie assemble the sandwiches at the shop and for us to begin eating them immediately as we stepped out onto the sidewalk. In that way, the ice cream would still be quite firm, and, theoretically, would not squeeze out so readily at the edges.

The ice-cream sandwich—a dairy treat that can’t be beat!

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