Sarah Bakes a Cake

With all my health talk lately, it's now time to splurge on the decadent.

Today was Billy's birthday, and I'm a fan of making birthdays as special as possible.

We started the day with a breakfast of pancakes and eggs, e-cards and blog posts.

Then... well, he had to go to work. There was really nothing I could do about that, but it worked to my benefit because I could make his cake without his knowing what was going into it.

See, Billy has happy memories of store-bought ice cream cakes. He's mentioned a couple times how he'd like that again. He's never suggested that my plain homemade cakes weren't good enough, but I know he'd really enjoy a good ole ice cream cake.

But man! Have you ever looked at the price of those things? Totally not in the budget.

So, today, while Billy was slaving away pulling cable. I was slaving away in the kitchen, making my first ice cream cake ever. And actually, it turned out WAY easier than I thought it would.

I started out with this recipe from Rachael Ray. But I did make a few modifications. For instance, I only had half a bag of chocolate chips, so I made do with half the ganache (which I actually thought was plenty). I also substituted cake crumbs for cookie crumbs, since I didn't want to waste the outer circles of the cake layers.

I also wanted my cake to be tall and round (that's more impressive, right!), so I cut my cakes to fit into a 2-qt sauce pan as the mold instead of a bread pan.





I will say that I highly recommend waiting at least the FULL 5 hours of freezing (and over night is probably preferable) before you invert the pan to remove the cake. I thought I'd be clever and ice the cake with a rich chocolate frosting after about 4 hours of freezing, but I ended up with a bit of a lopsided catastrophe. Quite un-ice-able. But delicious nonetheless.

I call it the Shabby Chic ice cream cake.


Needless to say... Billy was thoroughly impressed and raved about the cake.