Diddy Riese
926 Broxton Aveue, Westwood

We visited Diddy Riese on Wednesday night @ 9pm
Dish we will try to make – Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich $1.50

Restaurant Visit
What a fun time we had this week with our blog. Diddy Riese was our more playful restaurant option. It came out strong from the beginning in the poll, but just squeezed out a victory in the end. While Amanda had been there before, this was Romeo’s first visit to the Westwood staple and he was certainly surprised there was a line out the door! The place is pretty much a pick up and go type establishment, with only a few chairs inside. On most nights, you see people walking around the streets of Westwood with cookies and ice cream in hand, not only because they are good but the $1.50 price point is obviously a big hit with college students.

Don’t be intimidated by seeing a long line; it moved quite fast and we soon found ourselves staring at a display of wonderful smelling cookies. While they make other delights (like brownies and shaved ice) most people either come for 3 for $1 cookies, or the famous ice cream sandwich for $1.50. Here’s how they do it, you pick any two cookies out of the ten flavors they offer (chocolate chip w/walnuts, white chocolate macadamia nut, peanut butter, white chocolate chip, double chocolate w/nuts, oatmeal raisin, chocolate w/white chocolate chip, sugar cinnamon, candy, chocolate chip) and then select a flavor of Dreyer’s ice cream (vanilla bean, cookie dough, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, strawberry, chocolate, espresso chip, butter pecan, strawberry cheesecake chunk, peanut butter cup, chocolate chip, cookies & cream). With so many varieties, the hardest part is simply picking your favorite.

We started out with 2 sugar cinnamon (or snicker doodle to most people) cookies and the strawberry ice cream. Not surprisingly, we devoured it. The cookies are a good mix between soft and chewy yet just barely hard enough to hold the ice cream – our final bites were pretty much falling apart but we didn’t mind too much having to lick the ice cream off our fingers. We then purchased a chocolate chip cookie and vanilla ice cream sandwich to bring home and use as our dish to attempt to recreate.

One of the first things we noticed about the cookies is that they are very light in color. If any of you have baked cookies at home, you know that they typically have a golden brown color when taken out of the oven. So this was our first mystery to figure out and research in recipes. Secondly, how do you go about making Dreyer’s ice cream? We debated the philosophy of just what our blog “we can cook that” means. On one hand, since the restaurant itself buys and uses Dreyer’s in their product, could we then do the same thing? Or is our main goal to make everything from scratch at home? In the end, we decided to make ice cream at home (thank you Melissa and Eben for letting us borrow your ice cream maker) but realized that we probably would never be able to duplicate precisely the flavor and texture of commercially made ice cream.

Shopping
(prices reflect the cost of the package, not the portion we used.) The rest of the ingredients we already had in the kitchen.

Whole Foods-
Cage Free Eggs, 1 dozen $2.79
Whole Milk, 1/2 gallon $2.69
Unsalted Butter $4.79
Organic Chocolate Chips $1.99
Organic Brown Sugar $2.99

Recipe
Below is our take on the Diddy Riese chocolate chip cookie and homemade vanilla bean ice cream. While Diddy Riese uses their grandmother’s recipe, we feel you really can’t go wrong with homemade cookies and making ice cream is simply so much fun to do.

Bakes 2.5 dozen cookies.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich-

Chocolate Chip Cookie-

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup shortening
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Hardware
Wax paper or parchment paper
Cookie sheet

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In medium-sized bowl, sift the flour, salt, and baking soda together. Set aside.

In large bowl, cream shortening and sugar together until light and fluffy (you can use an electric mixer if you have one). Next mix in eggs. Then add milk and vanilla extract and mix well. Mix in the flour mixture a little at a time until thoroughly combined. Then fold in the chocolate chips. Let the combined ingredients chill in refrigerator for about 1 hour.

Scoop 2 Tablespoons of combined ingredients and form it into a silver dollar shape. Place it onto a wax paper-lined cookie sheet. Continue to make the form and spread each out on the sheet about 1 1/2” or more apart. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until light brown. Rotate the cookie sheet half way through for even browning. Once done allow cookies to cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheet. Let the cookies cool down to room temperature before making the ice cream sandwich.

Vanilla Ice Cream-

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
3/4 cup white granulated sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
6 large egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract

Hardware
Ice cream maker

In a medium saucepan, combine milk, sugar, and salt. Scrape the seeds from the vanilla bean into the milk with a small knife (such as a paring knife). Add the split vanilla bean to the milk mixture. Over medium heat, bring the mixture to just before boiling point. Remove from heat, cover and let the ingredients infuse for about 30 minutes.

Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl. Add some of the milk mixture to the eggs and whisk together.

Reheat milk mixture in the saucepan over low hea,t just until warm. Pour in egg yolks while stirring with a heat resistant spoon. Keep stirring constantly until the ingredients become a custard, just thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. (Note: Do not let the custard come to a boil and become curdled). Transfer the custard to a large bowl and let cool to room temperature. Then place in the refrigerator to allow custard to become cold.

When custard is cold, add cream to it and stir. Transfer the mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Plating
Once cookies are cold and ice cream is frozen, place one large scoop of ice cream between two cookies.

Rating- We give our dish 3 out of 5 stars.

Our thoughts- It’s hard to better an ice cream sandwich for only $1.50 but if you can’t get by Diddy Riese or you simply like to bake at home, we think we gave them a run for their money. While most chocolate chip recipes use brown sugar, if you want the visual look of a Diddy Riese cookie you can really only use white sugar. You can also play around with using either shortening or butter in your recipe.

Homemade ice cream is also a wonderful place to play with flavors. We chose vanilla bean for our experiment but we encourage the use of any type of fruit to make an unique flavor all your own.

How would you rate our recipe? We look forward to hearing feedback from you guys who are frequent patrons of Diddy Riese and think their cookies are the best. If you have any input in how they bake their cookies to be so light in color, we would also love to hear from you. Feel free to email us if you have any questions on the cooking instructions and don’t forget to vote for next week’s restaurant!

Tags: Chocolate Chip Cookies, Diddy Riese, Vanilla Ice Cream

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Dessert. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.