Ice Cream Brownie Cake

Happy VERY belated birthday, Elyse! Haha, oh man. So I wish I had the opportunity to take a picture of the inside of the cake, however I was the cake cutter at the party and felt it was a little too--weird-- if I stopped everything to do that. So this is what you get. :)

Yes, I know, it's SUPERBLY uneven, the frosting is terrible, the writing is crooked, but man oh man, was it good. I bought a Ghiradelli's Dark Chocolate brownie mix from the store as well as some frosting and went at it.

I say this is a budget dessert because this in comparison to buying an actual ice cream cake---well, those can run you $30-40 depending on where you get it and it wouldn't be this large. I was lucky enough to get my ice cream (Breyer's Vanilla) on sale for $2.88 per container. Can I just take a moment to say how things keep shrinking in size?? It used to be a half gallon container, now its a slim 1.2 L container selling for an original price of almost $5! Are they joking? Too bad the brownie mix wasn't on sale, but $3 for a bit of heaven without making my own brownies from scratch on the same day that I was making lemon bars--well, I'm willing to deal. Since I'm seriously unemployed, cheaper (for the most part because I can't say the same thing for cheap napkins from Target) is better. This was my birthday present to Elyse--a homemade ice cream brownie cake.

Recipe:

1 prepackaged cake or brownie mix
3 quarts of ice cream
1 13 x 9 x 2in baking dish
1 can of frosting
1/4c sprinkles
Foil or parchment paper

1. Line your baking dish with foil or parchment paper for ice cream. Scoop softened ice cream onto lined baking dish and try to smooth or even out as best as you can. Making it even is always the hard part. After you've made a layer a little under 1" high freeze baking dish with ice cream covered with foil until hardened.

2. After a few hours, remove ice cream from baking dish. This should be easy because of your foil underneath. Replace ice cream in freezer. I used a larger baking dish and put the ice cream in it with the foil on it still.

3. Prepare brownie mix and bake as directed in the same baking dish you originally used for the ice cream. It will be a thinner layer of brownie than the directions call for, so keep an eye on it to cook faster and not burn. Luckily because you'll be freezing it later, if your brownie comes out a little more done or underdone than normal, it will be fine because it firms up.

4. After your brownie is done baking, cool it down to still a little warm and place layer of ice cream on top. This way, hopefully your ice cream will melt just a little into the brownie to help the brownie and ice cream stick together when you cut it. (I had a little bit of a problem with this.)

5. Top ice cream layer with frosting, filling in any cracks. Of course if you had ice cream cracks, you can always add in more ice cream.

6. Sprinkles, flowers, etc. As you can see, I had some leftover beautiful baby blue sprinkles from my sister's baby shower and proceeded to carefully draw out Elyse on the top, cuz I wasn't crazy enough to write out Happy Birthday.

There are other ways to do this too. You could always take a page from Baskin Robbins and use a wire or string and after removing the carton from the ice cream, proceed to cut the ice cream in horizontal slices and place them on top. This didn't work well with the size of my dish so I ditched this option.

Obviously all of these things can be tweaked to your own specifications. I used the Dark chocolate brownie mix, but feel free to use a vanilla cake, a funfetti cake, a lemon cake, etc. The possibilities are endless. Same goes for the ice cream, maybe try a sorbetto instead which could be light and fun. You could also use a cream cheese frosting or a funfetti frosting. (Can you tell I like the funfetti? It's so pretty.) You could also get crazy and use a sheet cake and cut that in half horizontally and then have a layer of cake followed by a layer of ice cream followed by a layer of cake again and then frosting. That looks so much prettier than my ugly second cousin cake. :)

Needless to say, it was an absolute hit. The dark chocolate brownie complimented so well with just plain ol' vanilla ice cream by balancing out the sweetness. It was very well received and most of it was gone. Just have fun and enjoy!

5 of 5 stars! YUMMY.