I Scream, You Scream...

What says summertime better than an ice cream cake? I'm pretty sure I don't know. I got a crazy hare to try making ice cream cakes after I saw a Food Network special on ice cream desserts. (Yes, this channel is Son's new favorite TV addiction. Somehow, it doesn't feel like he's rotting his brain cells when he's watching chefs whip up fancy sauces. I don't know why.) Anyway, I went a little nuts for my sister's 4th of July party this year and made two ice cream cakes.

I'm here to tell you that it's not as difficult as you might think. Also that you can make it much easier if you learn from my mistakes. If you want to impress the heck out of friends and family at your next dinner party, here's all you need to know to whip up an ice cream cake.

1. Start with a good, buttery cake recipe. The pound cake I made, which contains six eggs, 1 cup of sour cream, and two sticks of butter, tasted fantastic when frozen. The chocolate cake I made, which is always very good at room temperature, was not chocolaty enough for my taste when frozen, and I think it's because it's not nearly as rich as the pound cake. I would think that a decadent brownie mix might be a better choice for a chocolate cake layer.

2. Freeze the cake layers separately, once you've removed them from the pan. Then freeze the ice cream on top of the cake layers. There are two ways to do this. You can buy ice cream at the store, soften it slightly, and then press it on top of the frozen cake layers, stacking cake and ice cream alternately, and then freeze the entire thing (which is what I did for the pound cake and raspberry sherbet above). Or you can make homemade ice cream, churn it, and then freeze it on top of the cake layers.

For my chocolate cake with mint chocolate chip ice cream, I turned the cake layers out of the pan and froze them, and then I made homemade ice cream and froze it in the layer pans. I thought I was being clever, but none of the layers of ice cream or cake were perfectly flat, so they were hard to assemble. Next time, here's what I'd do:

Bake the cake layers in spring-form pans (the kind you use for cheese cake). Turn the cake out, and freeze those layers (no need to wrap them up yet). Once they're frozen and the cake pans are clean, put the cake back in the spring forms (it should only come halfway up the side of the pan), and then put the freshly-churned ice cream on top. Smooth top of ice cream as flat as you can. Freeze. This way, you can just unmold from the spring forms, and have two nicely melded halves to stack up.

3. Don't be afraid to be creative with the icing. On one cake, I used Cool Whip, which spreads easily and freezes beautifully. On the other cake, I used freshly-churned vanilla ice cream. It was very cold work spreading this on, and I had to work fast before the churned stuff melted (best to do this on a well-frozen cake), but it looked pretty good, if you like that casual home-made-icing-swirled-on look. Neither was completely smooth like fondant or professional icing would be, but both tasted great.

4. Have a plan for transport: meat is your friend. My sister lives half an hour from me. I took a small square cooler, and I put a container of frozen short ribs on the bottom of it. Then I lined the sides with packages of frozen bratwurst and stir-fry steak before placing the cake (wrapped lightly in wax paper) in the center. All those slabs of frozen meat kept the cake nice and cold for the journey, and we didn't suffer any tragic melting incidents. We did pop it straight into the freezer to firm up before serving.

5. Make more than you think you need. There were thirteen of us. We ate half of one cake and three-quarters of the other. Each cake contained nearly three quarts of ice cream, as well as a standard 8" layer cake recipe of batter. If I weren't so busy licking the leftovers off my fingers right now, I'd do the math to figure out how insanely much dessert we each consumed on the 4th. Suffice to say, people can eat a lot of this stuff when they're outside and being social.

It just goes down easy when you're fresh from the swimming pool.


Let them eat cake!

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Need some time to make ice cream cakes? Here's how I bought myself a little time to get some cooking done.