Birthday Dessert Assortment

Went to a birthday dinner the other night and was assigned dessert :) The birthday boy doesn't like cake so I decided to make mini ice cream sandwiches and mini banana cream pies. Both are super simple:

For the bite-sized ice cream sandwiches Brooke and I made basic chocolate chip cookies following the recipe on the back of the chip bag, but we substituted 1 cup of m&ms for 1 cup of the chocolate chips just to be different. I had what I thought was a super good idea to make one giant ice cream cookie sandwich so split the cookie dough in half and put each in a large round baking pan and baked until done. I will keep working on this idea in the future but this time it didn't work the way I envisioned - each half was too thick to make into a sandwich (well Dave didn't think it was too thick, but he would enjoy eating a super thick sweet cookie sandwich LOL, for me it would have been way too much cookie).

I almost gave up on the idea and just served the giant cookies without making a sandwich, but then figured I'd attempt to make mini bite size sandwiches first. So I put mini cupcake liners in a small cupcake pan, then using a small round cookie cutter I cut out circles of the baked cookie and put in the bottom of the liner. Scoop a small bit of softened vanilla ice cream on top and then finish with another small circle of cookie. Freeze until ready to eat (obviously).  Turned out good and everyone loved them.

For the banana cream pies: first I baked the pie crust blind (that means without filling in them). Roll out premade pie dough and cut with a small 2" circle cutter, gently press into a mini cupcake pie (I've done this part before, click here for that post). When you bake crust without filling in it the dough will want to puff up so you need to weigh it down - they sell pie weights for this exact reason but I do not have any, an easy substitute is to weigh it down with dried beans. But I didn't have any of those either so I went online to see if I could find other substitute ideas - there were a few suggestions (rice and popcorn are the 2 I remember seeing, but doesn't baking popcorn seem like a mess waiting to happen?) and I went with trying dry rice. It worked really good, you just have to make sure to get all of the rice out after the crust has been baked - pretty sure baked in rice isn't going to taste good! I just used the edge of a small spoon handle to lightly scrap the rice out. Not the perfect scenario but it worked and the dough didn't puff up.

For the filling I just made banana pudding using 1 1/2 cups of milk, let it set up and then added chopped banana and using my small cookie scoop filled the pie crust with the pudding. Top with either a little piece of banana or cool whip.

In case those 2 things weren't enough Brooke made brownies that turned out so good - I think the secret was she put them in cupcake liners to bake, love that idea, and they got rave reviews!

Easy and delicious :)