Chilly Tea Sandwiches

I really like the Wittard Afternoon blend of tea Todd brought back from London once, so when the IMBB theme for this round turned out to be tea, I saw a chance to try it a different way. I'd been thinking about making a panna cotta, but the ice cream maker has been sitting on top of the fridge all summer, forlorn and unloved, so I took it down for these tea-flavored ice cream sandwiches.

I used Alton Brown's recipe for vanilla ice cream and substituted 3 teaspoons of tea leaves for the scraped vanilla bean. It's an OK recipe but I find all the cold fat in it leaves a greasy coating on the spoon. Maybe it's my machine (I have one of the hand-crank ones) or maybe I should use a custard-based recipe next time. The flavor's pretty cool, though.

Bring 2 cups half-and-half, 1 cup heavy cream, 3/4 cup sugar, 3 teaspoons loose black tea and a couple good pinches of salt just below a bubble (the edges will start to bubble a bit), then let it sit for about an hour to steep the tea. Pour through a strainer and chill overnight, then freeze it in an ice cream machine the next day. It gets to the texture of soft serve in the machine, then you transfer it to a lidded container to freeze it more solid.

I made a couple of tea ice cream sandwiches (using shortbread cookies, of course), but most of the cookies were broken when I opened the package so I also just mixed crumbs into the ice cream.