Best Ice Cream Cake Ever

My daughter asked me to eat “ice” with her friends. Ice = ice cream so, for her birthday, I made an ice cream cake from scratch. I could have bought it for a little more than I paid for the ingredients but, where’s the fun in that?

The great thing about making an ice cream cake from scratch is that you also have an excuse to finally make an angel food cake with all the egg whites you have left over! More on that later.

Here’s what you’ll need to make the ice cream cake:

For the Ice Cream (Vanilla and Chocolate)
6 C Half and Half cream
2 C Heavy Cream (aka whipping cream)
16 Egg Yolks
16 oz/ 453.5g White Sugar
1 1/2 oz (42g) Cocoa Powder
2 tsp Vanilla

For the Fudge and Cookie Centre
1/3 C Heavy Cream (aka whipping cream)
1/4 C Corn Syrup
2TBL + 2tsp Darn Brown Sugar
2TBL Cocoa Pwd
1 TBL Unsalted Butter
1/8tsp Sea Salt
1/2 tsp Vanilla
1/2 package of chocolate wafer cookies like the ones from Mr. Christie, or make your own crunchie chocolate cookies or buy Oreos and remove the white centre. Once you crush them up (1/2cm pieces or smaller but not powdered!) you’ll need about 1C. (I forgot to measure exactly! If it looks too fudgey add more cookie bits!)

Equipment
Medium sauce pan or two
a large glass bowl or two
An ice cream maker or two (borrow from a friend if you can because otherwise you will have to wait 2 days between making each flavour of ice cream for your ice cream bowl to freeze cold enough again!)
Two 9 inch cake pans. Preferably one being a springform pan. Or one very deep 9″ cake pan.
cooking thermometer or candy thermometer

1) Make the chocolate ice cream but don’t add the vanilla unless you really want to. I made it without since we would be eating vanilla ice cream with it.
Here’s the Alton Brown recipe. It’s perfect. CLICK HERE
-You’ll need to make the custard and let it cool for at least 4 hours- maybe 8 hours! Follow the recipe and your ice cream maker instructions.
– Once you’ve made the ice cream in the machine, put most of it in your 9 inch cake pan, the springform if you have one, leave enough room for the fudge cookie centre and at least a little vanilla ice cream. Put it into the freezer!
EDIT: I recently made coconut ice cream and actually re-read the instructions for my ice cream maker. It seems that, for the ice cream cake, I didn’t mix the ice cream long enough BUT it turned out great. The coconut ice cream I just made is almost a little too light. So, under-mix the ice cream for the cake a little.

2) Make the 1/2 the fudge sauce recipe. In the ingredients above, I’ve already halved it for you. CLICK HERE for the recipe.
-Mix it into your cookie bits
– Once the chocolate ice cream has hardened enough, and the fudge mixture has cooled such that it won’t melt your ice cream, pour it on the chocolate ice cream and spread evenly.
– Stick everything back into the freezer

3) Make the vanilla ice cream! HERE’s the recipe, again from Alton Brown.
I did not have real vanilla sugar but I did put a but vanilla bean into sugar over night (you need to do it much longer than that!) and then I scraped out the bean into the custard. You can see the little black specks in the picture of the cake. Because I added real vanilla bean, I cut the extract in half.
Follow the same steps as for the chocolate to turn the custard into ice cream!

4)Assemble
Now, unless you have been using a 6 inch deep pan, you’ll need to do the following:
– fill the first pan, over the fudge sauce, with the vanilla
– in your second 9in pan, pour the rest of the vanilla ice cream. Return both pans to the freezer for the night.
To assemble, take the edge off the full cake pan if using a spring form, or loosen it up in some warm water as well and flip it onto a cake board or plate.
Put the vanilla pan on top of some warm water until the ice cream loosens. Flip it over on top of the vanilla in the other pan. Put back into the freezer to let the vanilla layers fuse.

Finally, you can, if you want to get really fancy, make MORE ice cream and use it to ‘ice the cake’ but it’s totally fine without the extra ice cream.
I whipped up some cream, added food colouring and piped it on the cake because that’s what I had on hand. You could buy gel icing to write on it or make a sugar icing if you want!
Enjoy! It’s a lot of work but, my goodness! It’s soooo delicious!

More pictures to come; unfortunately no process photos. I was too tired at 10 pm when I was making the custards to bother with photos!

As for that angel food cake, look up “America’s Test Kitchen Angel Food Cake” and use those extra egg whites! You’ll be happy you did!

(Photo by Theo via Flickr)