Saturday, January 12, 2013

Chilly...Bears?


Along with my love of restaurants (that then usually go out of business), I try hard not to love any product that isn't really, I mean really established...because those usually get discontinued too!

One thing that we used to get every Christmas when we were younger was a type of ice cream sandwich called Chilly Bears. It was basically a cute little teddy bear-shaped sugar cookie with vanilla ice cream inside. They aren't available anymore, sadly.

However, a close (though not, by any means, exact) match to these wonderful little treats can be found below. They didn't really end up looking like bears. In fact, they didn't turn out very pretty at all...but they were still delicious!

Chilly Bears Ice Cream Sandwiches

Ingredients:

Refrigerated sugar cookie dough
Favorite vanilla ice cream, softened (I used Dreyers Slow Churned Vanilla)

Directions:

Roll out refrigerated sugar cookie dough and use cookie cutters to cut out the shape of your choice (teddy bears, gingerbread men, hearts, circles, etc. I would suggest making round cookies because the bears and gingerbread men tend to become unrecognizable with storebought cookie dough! The circles or hearts would look cuter...but then, it wouldn't be a Chilly Bear!).

Preheat oven according to package directions. Bake slightly longer than directed. You don't want the cookies to be soft (once they are sandwiched with ice cream, they will soften up again). You want the cookies to be hard, but not too hard (not to point where they are browned).

Let the cookies cool.

Once the cookies are cool, top one cookie with softened ice cream (about 3 tablespoons or so per ice cream sandwich). Top with another cookie and gently press together. Wrap in plastic wrap.

Repeat with remaining cookies and ice cream.

Store in the freezer. Eat right out of the freezer whenever you want a Chilly Bear!

Notes: The taste of the sugar cookies isn't an exact match for the ones that were used for the official Chilly Bears product. However, these are still delicious and they are about as close as we can get!

7 comments:

  1. Ah, so sad. You guys loved, loved Chilly Bears. Such a fun treat.

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  2. yeah, it doesn't look a lot like a bear! ha ha! I wonder if you rolled out the dough into rectangular sheet, cut it in half and put ice cream in the middle, then used the cookie cutters it would look more bear like.

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  3. where can we buy famous chili bear get every christmas

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  4. Chilly Bears used to be available in pretty much every grocery store around the holidays. They are discontinued now, however, and they are no longer for sale. This is the closest we have been able to get to it.

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  5. I thought Chilly Bears had chocolate chip ice cream in them.

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  6. They had Chilly Bears that had chocolate ice cream in them as well...but we mostly bought the ones that were sugar cookie bears with vanilla ice cream inside. Though the chocolate ice cream bears were really tasty too! You could make these any way you wanted to. I'll have to make them again and be much more careful on how pretty they turned out because these ones were pretty ugly! Ha ha!

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  7. Chilly Bears had cookies n cream ice cream in them. 🙂

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