Cooking: Ice cream cake

I saw the recipe for an ice cream cake in a magazine recently and thought it looked so cool that I'd have to go if it a go. I've never seen anything like it in the UK before. Little did I know that the ice cream cake was ubiquitous at five year old children's parties in the late 70's and early 80's here in Oz. There were some sickly sweet memories to overcome.

This recipe is bordering on almost not cooking it's so simple and I think that you could mess around with the recipe as much as you wanted. It was absolutely delicious and went down very well. All childhood memories were successfully banished.

Here is what I did...

First step is to make a basic sponge cake:
225g Butter
1 cup (or 225g) Sugar
4 eggs
1 cup (or 225g) Flour
Baking powder

- Heat your oven to 180 degrees
- Cream together the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.
- Add an egg and mix in, followed up a little bit of the flour and baking powder. Repeat until all of the eggs and flour are combined.
- Bake in 20cm round cake tin for 25mins.
- Take out of the oven and cool.

Once the cake has cooled you and assemble the ice cream cake:
One basic sponge (see above)
Two punnets of blackberries
150g bar of dark chocolate roughly chopped
Handful of toasted almonds
1.25 litres of vanilla ice cream

- Slice the cake through the middle so that you have two rounds. If you cake has a doomed top, slice that off so both rounds are flat.
- Line your 20cm cake tin with glad wrap (cling film) leaving plenty overhanging round the edges.
- Place one of your rounds of cake in the bottom of lined cake tin.
- In a mixing bowl place your ice cream. Take one punnet of blackberries, cut them in half and add to the bowl. Add half of your chocolate to the bowl as well. Mix with a wooden spoon until everything is combined.
- Spread half of your ice cream mixture over the cake in base of your tin.
- Put the second cake round into the tin and then top with the remaining ice cream.
- Put the cake bake in the freezer for 2/3 hours.

When it is time to serve the cake get it out of the freezer and remove from the tin onto a serving plate. Cover with the second punnet of blackberries, reserved chocolate pieces and toasted almonds. Leave to defrost slightly for 5-10mins before slicing.


I had some desicated coconut lying around so added that to my cake mixture. For the cake topping you could add whatever you wanted. How about mixing up the berries? Using a flavoured ice cream? Mixing in some smarties instead of the chocolate?