Grilled Pizzas and Ice Cream Sandwiches

Darlene is all about making fun desserts. Recently we were trying to come up with an original dessert idea and she though about trying to make grilled dessert pizzas. We experimented a little with that idea last night and ended up with a very nice dinner and dessert. I adapted a pizza dough recipe from the Millenium Cookbook and ended up with enough dough for three mini-pizzas. We each had a savory one for dinner and split a sweet one for dessert.

We haven't replaced our outdoor grill that bit the dust at the end of last year so we did these inside on a grill pan but the method worked well. Based on the tips in the Millenium Cookbook I rolled out the dough, put it on the grill pan for a minute or two, turned it a quarter turn and let it sit for another minute or so, then flipped it over and cooked for another minute or so on the other side. Here's a shot of one crust being finished up.
For the dinner pizzas, I used a base of roasted garlic, finely minced basil and olive oil, then topped them with roasted asparagus and broccoli, plus a little homemade un-cheese. Once the crusts are done on the grill, I put on the toppings and popped them under the broiler for no more than a minute to scorch the top a little. Here's the finished product.

For dessert we spread some apricot jam on a pizza crust then quickly grilled a banana then sliced it and put it on top.

And here's another fun dessert we had tonight - homemade ice cream sandwiches. Darlene made a coconut ice cream that she loosely based on a recipe in Vegan Vittles. Then she made some huge coconut-lime cookies from Vive le Vegan, froze the cookies, then sandwiched the coconut cream in between two cookies. We don't have an ice cream maker but still this coconut cream came out good and fairly creamy since it's made with silken tofu, frozen, then thawed a little and mixed in the food processor a second time. And the sandwiches were just plain outstanding.