Viral TikTok recipe for air fryer ice cream sandwiches is pointless and kinda trash

Welcome to AirFryDay, where — you guessed it —every Friday Mashable covers the latest trends, dispenses advice, and reviews recipes for your air fryer.

Here’s a puzzling riddle for you: What would happen if you put ice cream in a 325 degree oven.

If you responded, “It would melt, you dumbass blogger,” well then, you are correct, good buddy. Your prize is free access to Mashable dot com.

I, for some reason, didn’t fully consider how stupid that riddle was before taking on my latest AirFryDay task: frying ice cream sandwiches.

A viral TikTok from user @JimmyTheHib laid out the recipe. (Watch the TikTok here.) In short: wrap ice cream sandwich pieces in crescent dough, airfry at 325 degrees for six minutes, enjoy. I was skeptical but interested. My end result was quite gross.

Here’s how it looked when done by @JimmyTheHib.

This looks kind of good, right?
Credit: Screenshot: tiktok / @jimmythehib

That looks fine, right? And honestly the excitement from @JimmyTheHib helped convince me to make the recipe. They were so excited that it made me need to try it. What’s the worst that could happen?

You could make something really gross, it turns out.

But anyway, first things first, I ran out to the grocery store and purchased crescent dough and ice cream sandwiches. Per the viral TikTok’s instructions, I prepped everything before removing the ice cream from the freezer. This would, in theory, leave more of the ice cream intact through the cooking process. More on that later.

So, I rolled the dough out, per the TikTok, making it pretty thin in an effort to fully cook the dough in just six minutes. Here’s what that looked like on my cutting board, which i dusted in flour to keep the dough from sticking.

There’s the dough.
Credit: mashable

From there, I removed the ice cream sandwiches from the freezer, broke them into appropriately sized pieces, then folded them up tightly. This was important, according to the TikTok recipe. If there were holes, or holes formed in the cooking process, then you risked leakage. Obviously that would be bad.

The air fried ice cream prepped for folding.
Credit: mashable

The fully prepped ice-cream-sandwich-dough-ball-things were then dropped into a preheated 325 degree air fryer. Per the TikTok, they would be ready to eat in six minutes.

Folded and ready to airfry.
Credit: mashable

The result was…I have to be honest here: The result was trash. Garbage. Gross.

At first glance they little fried ice cream pockets looked fine, lightly browned and risen. There was a small leak in one, but nothing wild. They looked even better dusted with powdered sugar.

Things look fine, here. They were not.
Credit: mashable

Mmmmm, sugar.
Credit: Mashable

Things began to go awry when I cut the first pocket open and inspected its component parts. The ice cream was mostly melted and the dough was severely undercooked, bordering on raw, at its innermost parts. And that makes sense, considering Pillsbury recommends cooking its crescent rolls at 375 degrees for 11 to 13 minutes.

Further, in order to securely enclose the ice cream, you must have spots with two thin layers of crescent dough folded over one another. It’s a fool’s errand to try to cook that in six minutes. But if you blasted the air fryer any longer, or at a higher temp, it seems likely you’d have soup inside the dough.

Here is a cross section shot of my creation. To see the raw dough, look at the spot where the two halves remain connected.

Tough to tell but that dough is kind of raw in spots.
Credit: mashable / tim marcin

I took a big ol’ bite, hoping for the best. Basically it was melty ice cream, warm chocolate, and undercooked, gummy dough. My wife took a bite of one, too, and we looked at each other and grimaced.

The dough was pretty raw, man, I’m not sure what else to say. That’s not tasty.

Now, perhaps @JimmyTheHib from TikTok wrapped his sandwiches better. I suppose if you could get a tight seal with super-thin dough while never folding the dough over itself, then you might get a fully cooked product. And, who knows, maybe I messed it up. I do cook quite a bit, and I am a good home cook, but I am not an avid baker. This verged into baking, so again, maybe @JimmyTheHib was just better at making the recipe.

But my result was, upon cutting up all four dough balls, garbage. Melty, undercooked garbage. And, in general, I will eat anything. Pizza left out overnight? Sure. Gas station food of questionable origin? Lunchtime. Offal? I’d have an awful time saying no to that! But not these things. They just weren’t cooked and the ice cream was either melty or room temp.

No
Credit: mashable / tim marcin

Another issue: I just don’t see the point of these, even if perfectly cooked. The dirty secret about crescent dough is it’s kind of meh. It’s something you make on Friendsgiving to fill stomachs. Best cast scenario with this recipe, you’ve got saccharine bread wrapped around around an ice cream sandwich.

Do you know what’s really great on its own? An ice cream fucking sandwich. Refreshing ice cream inside a thin layer of chewy chocolate cake? Humanity did it, leave it alone, we do not need more.

Luckily, I had extra ice cream sandwiches from this whole process. I enjoyed one, on its own, over a graveyard of uncooked pastry.

Some things do not need to be improved.
Credit: mashable / tim marcin