Making an Ice Cream Cake

A young friend at church is having a birthday party, and I got to make the cake!  Sam and I took a bit of time away from home improvement projects to work on a culinary project instead.  The birthday boy's mom requested an ice cream cake, which I had never made before, but I thought it would be fun to try!  Here's how it went:

First, I make two 10-inch round chocolate cakes.  I use this chocolate cake recipe because it uses cocoa (which I usually have a ton of on hand) instead of baking chocolate (which I usually don’t).  It tends to “fall” a little because it is so liquid, but it results in a very dense, moist cake.  Each 10-inch round used most of a single batch, so I made two batches and used the extra to make a little cake for Steve and me for dessert.  Here is one of the rounds flipped upside down after cutting off the crown: 

After making both cakes and putting them in the deep freezer, I lined the same pan with plastic wrap, then packed it with slightly-softened ice cream.  I used almost two boxes (1.75 quarts each), but saved some for a crumb coat later.  After hardening the ice cream in the deep freezer, I pulled the ice cream out of the pan and layered it between the cakes.

 

Then I used the remaining ice cream (softened) to thinly coat the entire cake, filling in gaps between the layers.  This crumb coat helps hide imperfections, which tend to show through the layer of fondant frosting.  Sorry, I didn't get a picture of that because the ice cream was starting to soften a little too much and I had to get the cake back in the freezer!  

While the whole cake went back in the deep freezer to harden the crumb coat, I made a batch of rolled fondant frosting from this recipe (actually, it's rolled buttercream, which doesn't require exotic ingredients like glycerin).  I used paste food coloring (and cocoa added to the brown) to get a lump of brown frosting and a lump of blue.  Those are boy colors, aren't they?  Well, at least it's trendy....

I rolled the brown frosting into a thin layer.

Then, at the speed of light, I pulled the cake from the deep freezer, covered it with the brown frosting layer, did my best to smooth it, and ran it back out to the deep freezer as the ice cream started to melt.  Oh, and I took a picture in between.

Ugh, anyone who's worked with rolled fondant knows you need some time to smooth the fondant out, but cold fondant sure doesn't want to move.  I had to choose between smoothing out the sides and letting the crumb coat ice cream melt, or leaving the sides wrinkled and getting the cake back in the freezer.  I chose to keep the wrinkled sides and ask for grace from the birthday kid.

While the cake hardened (again!), I cut out the birthday boy's name and some polka dots using cookie cutters.

Then I pulled the cake out of the freezer one more time to add the blue decorations.

So, the cake is currently back in the deep freezer, eagerly awaiting it's debut at Jaylen's party on Saturday.  I'm a little worried the fondant will be too hard to cut when it is frozen, but I figure the warm knife needed to cut the ice cream will help.  What a fun adventure!  Only thing left to do is figure out how to get it to the party without melting....