Peanut Butter and Toffee Cookies with Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Ice Cream Sandwich

ok this is my first blog post. i am aware that everything is lowercase, i love m.c. escher, so this is my slight nod to him.
so i have been cooking most of my life. i have been watching food shows since i can remember. its odd, to think that as a kid we only had access to a few channels, and the one i always chose was pds cooking shows. i have been watching them instead of cartoons for years. i would get up and watch yan can cook, the frugal gourmet, the crazy guy in the red overalls, julia child and pretty much everything, and anything they had. then came food network. i was 15. i was so excited to have a channel that i can learn from everyday. so i have been studding food for as long as i can remember, and i am a pretty smart d00d, and i have a great memory.

when i married my wife, tara, i made her a promise that i would cook for her every dinner every night, unless there was something else happening. that was 7 years ago. and since i made that promise i have made everything as close to scratch as i can get (i don't have a pasta extruder to make the shaped pasta so i buy that).

lately i have been experimenting with brown butter, in all sorts of things. it was time to make some more ice cream, so i figured what the hell and i browned 3T of butter in my 8 quart soup pot. then added my simple as hell ice cream recipe which is as follows:

1 quart half and half
1 quart heavy cream
1 1/2 - 2 Cups of vanilla sugar (all i do is put my old vanilla beans in the sugar container lasts forever and even makes kool-aide better)
2 Vanilla beans cut and scraped of their seeds, and then added to the rest.

dump all that in a big pot, and cook it for about 10 min, you want to scald the milk (have little bubbles on the outside) or you can cook it for just a bit longer and get some caramelized flavors you could be missinig. then you have to get that mixture cold, and its a lot of volume to cool, so we usually cover it with a lid and let it sit on the granite counter tops so that huge mass of stone can suck the heat out of that, then i refridgerate overnight and turn it the next morning. we have a cheap ass ice cream machine that we bought from walmart, it was like 17 bucks 5 years ago. its the kind with a thin metal container and a blade that is rotated by a motor slowly. if its winter time i do this outside because of the snow it freezes much faster in the winter.

put it all in a tupperware, or several tupperware (this is an oportunity to make any kind of ice cream you want. i have used oreo's snickers, peanut butter cups, fresh fruit, and my personal favorite the pepermint stick joe joes's from trader joes) and freeze solid, like 8 hours.

now i have made this before, only with out the brown butter in the ice cream so i already knew what i needed to make. i got this recipe of the back of the heath chips bag, but i made a few changes.
first of which, i do not use shortening, its flavorless and blech, so replace that with 1/2 cup of butter. i didn't use the reese's peanut butter cause that also is full of things i cant eat, so we used the peanut butter we buy.

secondly, my ex-sister in law told me to alwasy double the vanilla, so of course i did that, and i do also make my own vanilla (Vodka + Vanilla Beans + Time = DELICIOUS, i have one that is for use and a backup one in the bar that is getting ready for the main show).

thircely, i do not make any cookies without using raw sugar so for the brown sugar i only use 1/2 Cup, plus 1/2 cup sugar in the raw, and only 1/4 cup of white sugar. i always use three types of sugar in my cookies, regardless of their ultimate finish, and i do it because each sugar has a different melting temprature, which means you still get some crystaly bits from the raw sugar, and the bit of extra vanilla in the white sugar, and of course the wonderful chewy texture of the brown sugar. also i always blend my sugar with my butter, its called the creaming method for a reason it really helps your butter to coat all the sugars and to help it add air bubbles which keep the cookies fluffy and chewey).

i bake them for 13 min, but i always rotate them half way through so that any hot spots in the oven will not cause issues for the delectable cookies inside. cool them completely on a wire rack, then yes then my friends you do this:

now you need to eat it. the ice cream will get pushed out of the cookies, it will drip on you, but trust me, that only makes it better! send me your feedback.........