Food 52

Rhubarb Semifreddo Ice Cream Sandwiches

This recipe fell into place when I was deciding what to do with our backyard rhubarb plants when they were finally large enough to harvest (finally!). I started by contemplating cake, but then wanted to do crisp, and then I thought maybe ice cream. I didn't want to have to pre-freeze the ice cream maker, so I switched the idea to semifreddo. But then I decided maybe I really had wanted a rhubarb crisp. As a compromise, I set out to make oat cookies to sandwich the (delicious!) rhubarb semifreddo. But then my husband begged me to make ginger cookies instead, and the compromise resulted in a slightly salty brown butter cookies with crystallized ginger chunks—which, as it turned out, are amazing with the creamy, rhubarb filling. These sandwiches are admittedly absurdly messy to eat, but are also absurdly difficult to stop eating. The semifreddo is adapted from a Donna Hay recipe and the cookie recipe is adapted from one I found in the LA Times online.