I've eaten ice cream cakes (yum!) but never made one. I'd never even seen a recipe, and I read a LOT of dessert recipes. So, off to the Google I went: "creative ice cream cakes".
I found a few that were pretty, but most were decorated like a regular cake; they were just cakes that happened to be made of ice cream. Inspiring? No.
Y'all, we've got to raise the bar. I want to see ice cream cakes that are done creatively. Take advantage of your medium! What can you do with an ice cream cake that you can't do with any other cake?
There may or may not be actual "cake" involved. The easiest thing to do is to bake a cake, then layer it with softened ice cream (instead of putting frosting between the layers). You can also stack different kinds of ice cream into layers and leave the cake out altogether.
In other words, what you do on the inside is pretty versatile; as long as there's ice cream and it's a cake shape, it's an ice cream cake. Hey, you can even do ice cream cupcakes.
An ice cream cake lends itself particularly well to the decorated-on-the-inside technique we discussed recently.
If you use several flavors of ice cream, each layer will look different anyway, so why not play that up? Why not layer dark chocolate, milk chocolate, coffee, and vanilla to make a pretty gradient that also tastes really good together?
Or make a bombe out of raspberry, orange, lemon, and grape sorbet; slice it open and you have not just a rainbow cake, but a rainbow cake whose top is curved like a rainbow.
For the outside, you can use:
As for my own Cake of the Month challenge, I'm about to try an experiment that may or may not be rather brilliant. Think "single serving" and "cute container"...and check back in a week to see my results!
