I love ice cream and I love a good cake, so in many ways an ice cream cake is the perfect combo.

This cake is incredibly simple. I made this chocolate cake, because it’s simple and wonderful and the recipe fits exactly into three 8 inch round tins. The night before I took two of the same tins and lined them liberally with aluminium foil, making sure to leave plenty of space be able to pull the foil out later on. Then I filled them with softened ice cream – just leave it to stand on the counter for 10 minutes first.

Filling each tin with about 2 quarts of ice cream is the sweet spot, a total of 4 quarts. I chose my favorite vanilla ice cream with pecans and caramel – you choose yours. Use a spatula to smooth the ice cream evenly into both tins, cover with plastic wrap and freeze overnight.

The next morning I baked the cake, but of course you can also do that the day before you assemble it. While it was in the oven I melted some chocolate by chopping 4 oz of good quality chocolate into a bowl and heating 1/2 cup of double cream to near boiling. When the cream is hot, pour it over the chocolate and stir carefully until all the chocolate has melted.

While the cake was cooling on a rack I made the pecan-caramel crumble. Put some parchment paper on a plate or in an oven dish, and spray it with oil. Add 5 oz of sugar to a non-stick pan along with 2 tablespoons of water and heat on medium high for about 10 minutes or until the mixture has a wonderful caramel color. Take it off the heat, add 3 oz of pecans to the caramel and mix everything in the pan. Be really careful because the caramel is like molten lava – it will burn you to the bone. Pour the caramel mixture onto the parchment paperand leave it on the counter for about 30 minutes, until it has cooled and hardened. Now you can put this in a plastic bag and bash it with a rolling pin to crumble it. Hit it as hard and as often as you want, depending on how fine you want the crumble 🙂

Now to the fun part – assembly! You might have to cut a little bit off each of the cake rounds to level them out.

• Start with one of the cake rounds on a platter.
• Take a round of ice cream and place it on the cake. Carefully remove the aluminium foil.
• Place another cake round on top of the ice cream.
• Place the second round of ice cream on top and remove the foil.
• Now it’s time for the last round on top of the ice cream. I put this on bottom up so that the top of the cake is completely flat.
• Pour the melted chocolate over the cake and use a spoon or a spatula to spread it out.
• Now all you have to do is decorate the cake with the pecan-caramel crumble – do it my way or whichever way you like.

I would really recommend freezing the assembled cake for at least two hours. I cheated a bit here and skipped this step, which makes the ice cream melt pretty fast 😉
When you put the cake in the freezer, make sure to have plenty of room and place it on a level surface, otherwise it will freeze all crooked. Take it out of the freezer just before serving.

I hope you’ve had a wonderful and very sweet – weekend 🙂