Lemon Ice Cream Sandwich Cake

Liz has a strange affliction: a voracious appetite for lemons coupled with the complete inability to taste them anymore. I watched her pour equal parts water and lemon juice into a tall glass on Sunday and chug it. “It’s just water,” she shrugged. When we made lemon raspberry buttercream for our macarons last month, we dumped in a whole cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice, then wondered why our butter was separating. “Still not tart enough” she concluded. There was also that unfortunate time we made lemon brownies 😐

Now I have the affliction too. For me, it all started with Smitten Kitchen’s whole lemon tart, which, true to its name, has a whole lemon in it, peel and all. I never even liked lemon squares before, but I’d only ever had store-bought. Not enough lemon zest, obvs! These days, when Liz and I bake on Sundays, there is always a lemon (or four) involved. “I eat them like apples now and nothing,” Liz exaggerates. Or maybe not.

This icebox cake is the latest thing we flavored with lemons. I’m so excited.

We used Joanne Chang’s holiday sugar cookie recipe from her Flour cookbook. Instead of rolling the batter out and using cookie cutters, we used a cookie scoop. The cookies are extra thick and chewy in the center, brown and crispy around the edges. We threw in a tablespoon of lightly packed lemon zest for good measure. It’s practically an involuntary reflex at this point.

We also attempted to make ice cream, because originally, the idea was to make lemon ice cream sammies. Sadly, with only heavy cream and no milk, a Kitchenaid ice cream bowl that was only frozen 3 hours instead of the requisite 15, and a freezer that I discovered to be not particularly cold, we came up with lemon flavored custard instead. But damn, was it a great custard. So rich.

We lined a cake pan with plastic wrap, piled in the cookies, and dumped in the custard. Our friend Mike loved it. Laura wouldn’t eat it, citing our use of ALL heavy cream. Nathan ate a sugar cookie and said it was quite lemony. I reported back to Liz and she texted back, “Yeah I gave them to people at work and just said they were sugar cookies because in my mind they are so mild. Then Kate asked, “Is there a lot of lemon in here?”

“We should start a lemon lovers bakery,” I suggested, completely for real.

“Yes! Omg it would offend everyone,” Liz texted back with glee.

As is, our icebox cake can only be eaten in one centimeter thick slices. It’s that rich. The flavors though, in our humble opinion, are on point. Below is the lemon ice cream recipe I tried to make, the only difference being I used heavy cream instead of half-and-half. Turns out that’s a pretty big difference. When I went ingredients shopping without checking the recipe, I mistakenly interpreted “ice cream” literally. OR, you could use one of my favorite Greek froyo flavors, Ben & Jerry’s Liz Lemon, a coincidentally fitting name for this post.