Ice Cream Treat a Fair Favorite
A Moo-Wich, the Northwest Washington Fair’s signature treat, is a little bit of heaven on a hot summer day. It’s also a lesson in delayed satisfaction.
The Moo-Wich is a huge slab of Edaleen vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two giant chocolate chip cookies, made by Woods Coffee with real butter. Each Moo-Wich comes frozen, secure in a Ziploc bag. You can’t dig in right away — the Moo-Wich requires a few minutes to soften or you risk chipping a tooth. But it’s worth the wait, and the effort.
“Moo-Wiches are an ice cream cookie sandwich that you have to work to open your mouth to get that first bite,” says Kim Vlas, a member of the Whatcom County Dairy Women.
It’s the Whatcom County Dairy Women’s most famous product, but the group is about more than Moo-Wiches. It educates the public on how dairy gets from the farm to your table, and provides scholarships to young adults. Cheryl DeHaan says the group, which has been around for more than a half-century, is one chapter of the Washington State Dairy Women organization. The Whatcom group’s fair booth is where they fund most of their scholarships. “We gave almost $10,000 in scholarships this year to go to high school and college students,” DeHaan says.
Moo-Wiches cost $5 apiece. It takes some planning to make about 10,000 of them each year for the weeklong fair. Starting just a few days before the fair’s opening day (August 13 this year), the treats are put together from an assembly line of 25 people working two eight-hour shifts. They stack cookies, slice ice cream, put them together, and zip them into plastic baggies. The Moo-Wiches are then stacked in milk crates to be put into a refrigerated truck.
DeHaan says the dairy women make people aware of how milk gets into their refrigerators, and into Moo-Wiches. “Milk doesn’t just appear in the back room of the grocery store,” DeHaan says. “It actually comes from someplace, from a family farm.”
To read our feature on Ice Cream, click here.
