Do you remember the Mark Peel cherry ice cream sauce that I told you made me cry at the Silver Spoons event?  That sauce was so incredible that I found myself daydreaming about it a week later.  A dish that sticks in your mind like that must be recreated.  Now, I’m no Mark Peel, but I figured I should be able to jimmy up a home-style version that would appease my craving.  Oh people, I wish I could send each of you a little jar of this divine sauce so you believe me when I say that it may be the best thing I’ve ever made.

At the event, I actually had the nerve (ahem, cajones) to ask Mark what was in his cherry sauce.  Wine.  Vanilla.  Star anise.  Cherries.  Working from that rough outline, I came up with a respectable tribute to his other-worldly original.  A good red wine reduction sauce paired with juicy, fresh Bing cherries, freshly scraped vanilla beans and spooned over vanilla ice cream.  Say hello to your new Grown Up Ice Cream Sundae.

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Ice cream sandwiches are the pinnacle of summer food.  They evoke images of hot, sticky afternoons spent lounging outside in the company of good friends without a care in the world.  Obviously, some incarnation of these summer goodies needed to make an appearance at my Mini-Urban Cookout.

The outside of an ice cream sandwich needs to have a little crunch to it, in my opinion.  It needs some strength to hold up to all the soft ice cream in the middle.  While a brownie would taste divine, it may become overly mushy when sandwiched against ice cream.  To get the best of both worlds, the flavor of a brownie with the staying power of a cookie, I pulled out an old favorite recipe for brownie roll-out cookies.

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