There are endless recipes you can make with products found at Trader Joe’s, and if you ask any regular TJ’s shopper, they probably have a litany of these easy “recipes” at the ready for any and every occasion. As a frequent Trader Joe’s shopper myself, I’m partial to miso soup dumplings and a pollo asado bowl.
Since tons of TJ’s shoppers have their go-to favorite recipe made exclusively with Trader Joe’s products, the beloved grocery chain decided to start a yearly recipe contest in 2024. However, since it’s too complicated to judge customer-created recipes, the contest, which is now in its second year, judges recipes created by Trader Joe’s employees at stores all over the country. Per the rules of the contest, employees must use no more than five ingredients, and all the ingredients must come from Trader Joe’s. Common kitchen staples such as sugar, butter, and salt are considered “freebies,” and are not part of the ingredient tally.
The winning 2025 recipe was announced earlier this week—Honey Gochujang Corn Cookie Ice Cream Sandwiches from store 426 in Houston, Texas—and it’s as unusual and tasty as it sounds. In a discussion about the dish on the most recent episode of the Inside Trader Joe’s podcast, host Tara Miller called it “absolutely delicious,” and her cohost Matt Sloan agreed, noting that this recipe beat out more than 400 others, in part because of its standout name.
Over the course of the podcast, Miller and Sloan discussed the genesis of the winning dish with its creator, Summer. As the name suggests, the dessert consists of vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two gochujang-spiced cornbread cookies, which get an additional flavor boost from some honey, butter, and two scoops of melted vanilla ice cream mixed directly into the batter. The final result is sweet, spicy, and unlike anything you’ve ever tasted before.
According to Summer, she knew she wanted cornbread to be part of the recipe since she grew up eating it in Louisiana. From there, she wanted to add more depth of flavor to the cornbread mixture, which would ultimately be turned into cookies. After realizing that her first choice, white miso paste, was a seasonal TJ’s item and therefore not eligible to be used in the contest, she pivoted to bolder, spicier gochujang—a fermented red chili paste with a touch of sweetness that’s commonly used in Korean cooking.
Thanks to a past job at a bakery, Summer says she knows “the basics of a good cookie recipe,” which is how she thought to add honey instead of eggs to the cornbread batter, as well as melted vanilla ice cream, which helped bind all of the batter ingredients together. The gochujang, she explained, was “a really great way to coat the outside of the cookie.” Making the final product into an ice cream sandwich, she added, “helped bring everything together [and] cool everything off.”
Miller noted that during the tasting and judging process, the entire room “went silent” upon sampling the Honey Gochujang Corn Cookie Ice Cream Sandwiches. “That just doesn’t happen,” she admitted. “We’re [usually] tasting and talking about everything. We can’t shut up, even with food in our mouths.”
If you’re looking for a spicier alternative to this award-winning Trader Joe’s dessert aisle find, give the Honey Gochujang Corn Cookie Ice Cream Sandwiches a whirl! You can find the step-by-step recipe here.
Read the original article on Real Simple
