Easy, Breezy, Beautiful…Ice Cream Cake

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, 19 days according to WordPress. I really meant to post sooner. Five drafts and a half finished Word document on my computer prove it but my life has been exceptionally crazy. It happens. However, I seemed to have survived this most recent bought of My Life is Trying to Kill Me so hopefully I’ll return to more regular posting. Not that I have ever been regular or systematic about it, but at least I’ve been more frequent int the past and I do 

One small part of the recent life chaos was my oldest son’s birthday. He just turned 17. I don’t think either of us is ready for that. Since I hadn’t seen him that morning I texted my almost-man-child on his birthday. I told him I was really not ready for him to be so stinkin old. He confirmed that he isn’t either. “Great”, I replied ,”how about you be 13 and I can be 30?” His response was that he didn’t want to endure middle school again but we could go with 15 instead. Fair enough. Unfortunately we don’t get to stagnate no matter how hard we try. (Although I did stay 25 for like three years.) Sometimes I really do think he’s trying to stay in high school. He appreciates where he is right now and doesn’t want the fun to end. I get it. Being an actual adult kind of sucks sometimes. But anyhow, ice cream cake.

My son is a little different: He doesn’t like cake.  What the actual Eff, right?!?! Okay, it’s not all that unusual but I truly enjoy cake or at least good quality frosting with a small coating of cake attached. It’s one of the best parts of birthdays. My first born does not, however, share this penchant. Instead he enjoys and requests ice cream cake. I used to buy a small, ridiculously priced ice cream cake every year and then make some other cake to feed the masses. Of course, everyone wanted a piece of the tiny ice cram cake and it got stretched pretty thin. A few years back I realized that it’s super easy to make your own ice cream cake. I may have even taken some photos of the process last year with the intention of blogging about it because I wanted to enlighten anyone who may not be aware of the ease with which one can DIY ice cream cake.

This year I loosely copied a video I saw on Facebook, mostly just for the crust though. In the past I’ve done cookie crumb crusts or baked a thin layer of brownie for the crust but this video showed ice cream sandwiches placed around a spring form pan and cookie crumbs for the bottom. It’s a simple twist that makes homemade ice cream cake just that much cooler.

Cutting and placing the ice cream sandwiches before they all melted was a bit of a challenge but other than that it’s very straightforward.

The next step is the ice cream. Softening it helps but it was so warm that I just set it out while I put the crust together.

The chocolate could have been a little more malleable but by the time I got to the cookies and cream it was nice and pour-able.  That makes it easy to get a good smooth top layer on your ice cream cake. In the video they make this fancy top layer with whipped cream, pretzels, cookies, and syrups buuuut I forgot to get whipped cream so my topping was the larger chunks of cookies that I pulled out of the crust crumbs and what little chocolate syrup my kids hadn’t used to fuel their unreasonable chocolate milk habits.

Once your ice cream cake is all assembled just throw it back in the freezer for a while. Usually a few hours does the trick but if you want to play it safe make the thing the night before.

I don’t think the extra topping stuff was missed, this thing disappeared very fast.. It didn’t even have time to melt. But if you do want your ice cream cake to look a little more fancy here’s the video I copied.