The days of shrink-wrapped ice cream sandwich packages pulled from a 7-Eleven freezer are behind us. Today there’s a batch of local independents trapping ice cream between everything from homemade chocolate cookies to cake donuts to pressed cereal. For a cool treat, check out the best ice cream sandwiches around Boston.
Blackbird Doughnuts, now boasting seven outposts around Boston, uses its title treat to create Doughnut Ice Cream Sandwiches. Select a donut flavor of your choosing, such as Strawberry Honey or Salted Caramel Pretzel, and Blackbird will slice it open and fill it with vanilla, chocolate, or a twist of soft serve ice cream.
Expand your perception of the ice cream sandwich by ordering the iteration from Gracie’s Ice Cream when available. The Somerville maker has a cult following for tasty flavor mashups like Salty Oreo ice cream in a famous Fluff cone. It also has a second location, Earnest Drinks, near Kendall Square. Doing away with cookies entirely in their special sandwich, the Gracie’s folks press vanilla ice cream between marshmallow-bound sheets of Fruity or Cocoa Pebbles. The experience, occasionally available at both shops, is melty, crunchy, and almost like eating an ice cream panini.
At four Boston locations, FoMu combines coconut-based ice cream and Chocolate Chip cookies baked in-house into a vegan-friendly novelty. Whether you partake in dairy or not, you’ll find it hard to resist an ice cream sandwich from this plant-based purveyor featuring dark chocolate-studded Fresh Mint or Sweet Lavender ice cream. Order one up instead of your typical cup or cone, or peruse the freezer to pick up a wrapped ice cream sandwich for later.
The immutable law of a good ice cream sandwich—that your cookies are never to be as cold as the ice cream—is well understood by Porter Square’s Honeycomb Creamery. House-baked Chocolate Chip Cookies are fresh, soft, and never frozen, and available daily to pair your preferred scoop. That’s to say nothing of the Cakewich, a genius creation that sandwiches one creamy, creative ice cream flavor per month between two pieces of homemade cake, festively decorated. Stay hungry for other rotating specials, like Coffee ice cream with Chocolate Sugar Cookies and a gooey Whiskey Caramel filling.
Bow Market’s resident macaron bakery Maca is the only place you’ll find a Unicorn Poop ice cream sandwich. Said more plainly: It’s a crispy-chewy macaron decorated to resemble an almost too-cute mythical beast, filled with pastel, rainbow-sprinkled ice cream made with Fruity Pebbles and crushed-up macaron cookies (prepared by none other than the mashup masters at Gracie’s Ice Cream).
For years, Top Shelf Cookies has been a pop-up regular, sharing stacks of snacks like Boston Lager Chocolate Chip and Black and Gold (a dark cocoa cookie studded with peanut butter chips) at SoWa markets and other local events. Since opening a storefront in 2020 in Dorchester, these local treats are fresher than ever—and you can order any two of them as a sandwich with Dot-made vanilla from The Ice Creamsmith. (Or in a cookie frappe!) There’s also a rotating ice cream sandwich special, like chocolatey cookies with black raspberry ice cream.
State Park in Kendall Square deals in nostalgia and delicious indulgence, from the dive bar vibes and jukebox selection to the stacked Nashville-Style Hot Chicken sandwich. As a sibling to next-door Mamaleh’s Delicatessen, this modern neighborhood bar tends to have pastry case-worthy desserts, too, such as this summer’s special Frozen Painkiller Ice Cream Sandwich. Named for the classic tiki drink, this treat hits the spot with a contemporary twist: It’s fully vegan and gluten-free with crunchy sugar-coated cookies, rum-infused pineapple jam, and coconut-vanilla FoMu Ice Cream.
Updated by Jacqueline Cain
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