Meringue-Topped, Layered Ice Cream Birthday Cake

by Aimee

Our home was a-buzz with birthday excitement last weekend, even if the party planning only started sometime Friday afternoon.

Mere moments after I had seen my parents out the door for their return trip home, I opened my trusty notebook, where I jot down ideas and details for every gathering we host. I wrote ‘Noah’s 11th Birthday’ and drew a line underneath the words, pausing for a moment to take in that number.

Eleven. It’s really teetering on the edge of childhood. There would be no robot cake this year, no pinata-thumping  or eating doughnuts off of string. Treasure hunts are a thing of the past for my 6th grader – and that is all okay; there will always be birthday cake.

Noah’s not into frosting at all, in fact, he wants nothing to do with it. He’s pretty keen on ice cream, however, and with this in mind, an idea for an epic (it must be epic) layered, ice cream cake began to take shape in my little book. A brownie layer would be good, and a chocolate cookie crumb base. He loves crisp meringues, why not work those into the topping.

After one shopping trip, lots of scooping and sculpting and melting and freezing, we had a birthday cake. An epic birthday cake.

The base has five layers: a chocolate cookie crust, vanilla chip ice cream, dark chocolate ice cream, fudgy brownie, and birthday cake ice cream (the kids picked the flavours, obviously). The top is scoops of four Haagen Daaz flavours, packed in with mini meringues. The base is frosted with a stabilized whipped cream (using gelatine). A few mini chocolate chips adorn the top and an ’11’ in sparklers provides the finishing touch. Birthdays comes but once a year; let’s celebrate them to the fullest.

I should probably preface this tutorial by stating that this is a semi-homemade cake. As in, I didn’t make any of the ice cream, nor the meringues, and, yep, even the fudgy brownie layer was from a box. That was all I had time for, as I also prepped a spaghetti & meatball and Caesar salad feast for a dozen of us that Saturday night.

So, I guess if you’re looking for an ice cream cake that comes together fairly simply and feeds a big gang (with oh-so-essential leftovers for midnight snacking) this is the tutorial for you. And if you should choose to make your own cake entirely from scratch, start with my simple vanilla bean ice cream recipe and build from there. Whatever works!

I’ll take you through my (first ever) ice cream cake with a series of iPhone photos that I won’t apologize for because – ohmygosh – these cakes are so. very. melty. Pausing even to snap a photo with my phone made me nervous…but I got a few anyway.

I really built the cake on the fly, starting with the ‘base’ in the photo above. When the kids and I unloaded the groceries on Friday afternoon, three 1L cartons of ice cream were already quite soft. So I grabbed three, 8-inch round pans (it helps that I have a ton of them), lined them with cling wrap, and pressed the ice cream into them.

(Essentially, this is really all you need to do to prep your own ice cream cake. Soften ice cream. Press into desired mold. Freeze until sold. Unmold and decorate.)

Afterward, I baked a batch of brownies in yet another 8-inch round pan, letting them cool completely before pressing them into the pan on top of the chocolate ice cream layer.  I mixed chocolate cookie crumbs with melted butter and made a base for the cake, pressing the vanilla chocolate chip layer of ice cream on top so they could freeze together.

Once the individual layers had spent at least four hours in the freezer, I unmolded each one and stacked them on top of each other. I then froze that base overnight, well wrapped in plastic.

The topping for my cake came together easily, with a plastic-lined spring-form pan and two sizes of ice cream scoops. As you can see from my set up above, I worked with everything on ice.

Quickly, quickly, I scooped four flavours of Haagen Daaz into balls and pressed them into the pan, alternating with mini meringues. I heaped them up in the middle and then rushed the whole thing to the freezer.

About 4 hours later, I unmolded the topping, which was now a solid mass, and kept it in the freezer, ready for assembly.

On the morning of the party, I whipped up a batch of stabilized whipped cream frosting (easier than it sounds) and got ready to assemble the cake. I set myself up outside on my back deck, because it was a chilly fall morning – much cooler than my kitchen.

I frosted the top and sides of base with the whipped cream frosting, using a little extra to help it stick to my wooden cake stand. Then I simply set the Haagen Daaz topping like a crown on top of the base. Back into the freezer! Later I piped a bit of the frosting around the base.

I was quite happy with the affect when the top and bottom layers came together – and with a hot chef’s knife, it sliced up nicely into wedges. What do you think?

Just writing up this recipe has me salivating.  Good thing I have a few slices leftover in my freezer right now… Cheers!

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