Tesco’s recently introduced birthday cake sandwich – an unholy assemblage of jam, soft cheese, frosting and sprinkles, stuffed between two slices of brioche – may well be the world’s most depressing foodstuff, a cake designed to be eaten in one go, possibly on your birthday, probably alone.
The birthday cake sandwich follows hard on the heels of M&S’s strawberries and cream sandwich – a UK version of the fruit sandwiches, or furutsu sandos, sold in convenience stores in Japan. The M&S sandwich received a certain amount of criticism, along with some surprisingly good reviews. But both sandwiches were controversial, not least from a nutritional standpoint (the Tesco sandwich contains 31.5g of sugar, over a third of the recommended maximum daily intake for an adult), but also because they upset our notion of what a sandwich is. Aren’t they supposed to be savoury? Aren’t they supposed to be lunch, rather than dessert?
Bur sweet sandwiches are not uncommon – anything with jam in it counts – and the sandwich itself is not a rules-based enterprise: it’s more of a continuous trial-and-error process – even as you eat a sandwich you’ve just made, you’re thinking about how it could be better next time. When it comes to sweet fillings, you’ve got to try at least a few before you reject them out of hand. Here are 12 ideas to get you started.
A note: most sweet sandwiches do not require a recipe, and are subject to endless modification. Feel free to experiment with different breads, flavours and proportions – you may as well have it the way you want it.
First up, a deep-fried peanut butter and jelly (clear jam) sandwich, from food blogger Davie Leite at the website Leite’s Culinaria. Arguably, the classic PB&J is already a sweet sandwich – but the addition of a sugary deep-fried batter turns this humble childhood treat into the kind of snack that helped kill Elvis. The recipe offers two extra options I immediately rejected: sliced banana (no thank you) and a white chocolate ganache for dipping (are you kidding?).
A sturdy sourdough bread is recommended. I might have sliced it a little too thick – of no consequence taste wise, but it makes it harder to fry. Be careful not to go overboard with the fillings. Slap it together as you normally would, dip the whole thing into the batter, and deep fry it in hot oil, flipping once.
If you’re looking for rare examples of foodstuffs that are not improved by deep-frying, you can start here. You could tinker with proportions all day and still not make something palatable out of this heavy, greasy, sticky mess. In case it was just me, I forced some on my oldest son, who simply shook, went quiet, then said, no.
Other sweet fried sandwiches include the grilled Nutella banana sandwich, a grilled Nutella and marshmallow sandwich and the banana french toast sandwich. The classic Monte Christo sandwich, while technically savoury (it’s ham and cheese on french toast), is traditionally served in the US dredged in icing sugar, with jam. As an American, I apologise.
The Japanese strawberry and cream sandwich – or ichigo sando – on which M&S based its version, is easy enough to recreate at home. Just watch recipe developer Marc Matsumoto. I substituted brioche slices for the authentic Japanese milk bread: it’s easier to find.
First, carefully wash, top and dry your strawberries – five per sandwich. Whip a generous quantity of double cream, sweeten to taste and set aside.
The final key component in this recipe is strawberry jam – spread a thin layer on both bread slices and heap the whipped cream on top in shallow pyramids. On one half push your largest strawberry into the centre of the cream and then position four more round it, pointy ends facing the corners of the bread.
Place the other slice on top and gently push down at the corners and edges until the top is sort of domed and the edges of both slices are nearly touching. Now wrap the whole thing snugly in cling film and leave in the fridge until it firms up – about half an hour. Then remove, unwrap and slice crossways. If you’ve been careful, you should end up cutting right through the middle of three strawberries – presentation counts.
This is delicious, and why shouldn’t it be? Ultimately, what’s not to like? Jam, strawberries, cream, brioche – it’s basically a Victoria sponge.
If you’re after a more decorative fruit sando, you can make these rather sophisticated flower versions using grapes, kiwi, tangerines and strawberries.
The ice-cream sandwich was invented in New York City at the turn of the last century, as an improvement on small slabs of ice-cream served between sheets of paper by street vendors. The idea caught on. “There are ham sandwiches and salmon sandwiches and cheese sandwiches and several other kinds of sandwiches,” announced the New York Mail and Express in 1899, “but the latest is the ice-cream sandwich.” They cost a penny, and quickly became a fad.
It’s hard to be precise about what went on the outside of those first ice-cream sandwiches. A reporter sent out to investigate by the New York Sun in 1901 described it as “a thin, delicate, freshly baked and altogether agreeable sweet cracker”.
The ones I remember from childhood were chocolate, rectangular and pleasingly bland. This recipe is a decent approximation, without getting too complicated – flour, sugar, cocoa powder, butter, bicarbonate of soda, a pinch of salt, milk and a few drops of vanilla, whisked to a smooth consistency, dropped in uniform spoonfuls on to a lined baking tray and baked for about 10 minutes, but keep an eye on them.
Once they’re cool, they need to be frozen for an hour before they’re stiff enough to squish a scoop of ice-cream between. Refreeze until needed. This recipe contains an important advisory: the ice-cream must be of the worst sort – soft and airy – for this to work. The ice-cream sandwich isn’t everybody’s idea of a good time – a lot of people don’t like biting into ice-cream – but I would eat these for breakfast.
Other variations include the chocolate chip cookie ice-cream sandwich and the Italian brioche con gelato, which is literally some ice-cream in a bun (apparently Sicilians do eat these for breakfast).
The apple pie panini sounds plausible enough: take the basic constituents of an apple pie, jam them between two slices of bread and toast. This recipe, from justataste.com, combines thinly sliced apple, mascarpone whipped with honey, and bread (they use raisin bread, but I couldn’t find any, so I returned to my brioche loaf).
My version, alas, was not an unalloyed success: the mascarpone melted and leaked out everywhere, while the apples remained uncooked, and the brioche went gluey in the heat of the sandwich press. It could work with different bread and different filling, but that, I think, would be a different sandwich.
Finally, if you are so minded, you can reproduce your own birthday cake sandwich at home, such as this one from Love in My Oven. A cake sandwich is, after all, just a cake with the icing on the inside – the “bread” here is just a sheet of sponge. This recipe is loosely based on sandwich cakes currently available from vending machines in US shopping malls. But if you’re going to produce a single slice of cake for your birthday, it seems somehow fitting that you should have to make it yourself. Many happy returns.
