When I was very little (under six), my birthday cake was always the same thing—at least as far as I remember, which probably means it was made at least a few years in a row around the time I turned four and five years old*—a layer cake (alternate layers of chocolate and Party Rainbow Chip yellow cake) with Betty Crocker Rainbow chip frosting. Which I loved. However, the cake I had most growing up (between the ages of 6 and 19) was the Baskin and Robins Ice Cream Cake, with Chocolate Cake and Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. Now, let me tell you, I LOVED this cake. The only reason that I stopped having this cake for my birthday's was because there wasn't a Baskin and Robbins in a convenient location in either New York City (where I went to university) or in Lowell, MA where my mother had moved. And let me tell you, I missed that cake (there was a particularly bad incident of a Carvel ice cream cake, which I thought was rather disgusting). Sure, there were times, especially after I met my wonderful husband, and he started buying the cakes, when there were still some great cakes. I am particularly thinking of the year I turned 25, when Alex bought me a fantastic hedge hog chocolate cake:
Although it was hard to cut into the cake the first night (I looked away, Alex did the deed), but I must say, the cake—amazingly—tasted better and better the older it got!
Anyway, I was very excited when in January 2011 (or perhaps it was late 2010), I saw that a Baskin and Robins had opened on Great Russell Street (right across from the British Museum). My excitement grew when we discovered in late January 2011 that they could indeed make me an ice cream birthday cake with a chocolate cake base and mint chocolate chip ice cream! So we ordered the cake and agreed to pick it up on Sunday after church (my birthday being on a Monday that year). There was a brief hiccup when the store wasn't open when we went to pick up the cake and had to run back over there after they called us a few hours before closing. But in the end it all worked out. And it was (very, very, very nearly) just as good as I remembered it. But...it was much, much, much, much, much, MUCH more expensive than it had been when I had last purchased one in 2002 in New York. And also, the whole time I was eating it I was thinking—apart from yum, yum, yum—but, I could make this myself, surely. Indeed, when a wonderful lady gave us an ice cream maker for our wedding, my plans became surer. For my birthday this year I would make my own ice cream cake. And I did. Here's how.
Cake Base
For the cake base I used Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe. Of course, you could use any chocolate cake recipe that you want to use, any particular favourite cake recipe at all really (no need to go with chocolate, if you love a different flavour of cake)! However, I can really recommend this particular cake recipe as it is very delicious (even when it is coming out of the freezer, which tends to take a bit of flavour away from any cake). Nigella tells you how to do it all just wonderfully, so the only thing I will add is that if you are making it for an ice cream cake is that although Nigella gives instructions for making it as a sandwich cake using two tins, I made it in one large spring form pan.
Here's how it looked when it came out of the oven:
So, after the cake has come out of the oven, you need to let it cool down completely to room temperature. Then, you get on with making the ice cream.
I have to say, this may be one of those recipes that is best if you have an ice cream maker. I know you can make ice cream without one by churning the ice cream by hand every hour or so as it is freezing, but frankly, that is just too much of a complicated faff for me. The other option is to go with a no churn ice cream, which usually is made by whipping double cream (and the flavourings) to very soft peaks (do not over beat) and freezing.
Anyway, we do now have an ice cream maker, so I didn't have to worry about that (Thank you, thank you, thank you Lauren!). My only consideration was to go with the full "proper" ice cream which, which is made by first making custard and then adding double cream, chilling and putting in an ice cream maker, or whether I would make "cheat" ice cream, which I recently discovered, which is made by dissolving sugar in double cream and pouring it then straight into the ice cream maker. My only concern was that I although nine times out of ten I can make delicious custard, I didn't want my birthday ice cream to be that 10th time. So I bought extra cream and decided to try the "proper" kind, but if it went wrong to just go the easy way with the extra cream.
My decision was swayed as well because I found a fantastic "proper" ice cream recipe for mint chocolate chip...Isaac Mizrahi's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. To me that just sound's fantastic! What better way than to make you feel indulgent on your birthday than by having your favourite flavour of ice cream in a recipe by a wonderful fashion designer. One who actually seems like a nice guy (with the only other "nice" male fashion designer in the public eye that I can even think of being Tom Ford). So, I went with Isaac Mizrahi's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream recipe. And it was delicious, lovely, even as a custard before I put in the double cream, and even before it was made in to ice cream (I could have eaten it all up like soup, just as it was). Just for information, the "cheat" recipe that I was going to use (and have used other times) is this Easy Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Recipe, which I still highly recommend as a lovely way to have home made ice cream on a Friday night after work as with an ice cream maker you can put it on when you come in, let the machine do its work while you get dinner, put it in the freezer before you sit down to eat and it will be ready when you are for dessert.
Anyway, here is the ice cream in the machine:
Of course, normally when making ice cream with our ice cream maker we would put it in the freezer to harden up a little bit more, but when making an ice cream cake you need to use the ice cream straight from the machine (or if this isn't possible/convenient, you need to let the freezer hardened ice cream melt a bit before adding it to the cake).
So, I took the ice cream from the machine and spooned it onto the top of the chocolate cake up to the brim of the spring form pan. As shown here:
Then I covered the whole thing first in a couple of layers of cling film and then in a couple of layers of tin foil and popped it back into the deep freeze.
The next day once it had had a chance to get good and hard, I got on with making the frosting. Now, I thought long and hard about frosting, and after reading widely on the subject and thinking about it, I decided that the only way to go was with a whipped cream icing. You could use buttercream, but it will be a bit odd, so be warned. Also, I love whipped cream, and my husband is only okay with it in certain dishes, never on its own, but once it is made into a frosting and frozen it is really more ice cream than whipped cream, even my husband agrees with that!
In my search for the frosting recipe, I turned to the good old American stalwart of The Joy of Baking for this frosting recipe, which was wonderful, so I'm glad I did!
Here is a picture of how it looked being made in our KitchenAide Mixer:
Then I took the cake out of the deep freeze, unwrapped it and frosted it:
Then I re-wrapped it in cling film and aluminium foil and put it back into the freezer to freeze the frosting.
Then I had a fantastic birthday!
First, my husband surprised me by getting up in the middle of the night to blow up balloons for me to wake up to:
Then, after work, he took me out for a wonderful romantic dinner at "our restaurant", the fantastic Gourmet Pizza Company in Gabriel's Wharf on the South Bank, and we came home and had ice cream cake.
And this makes a lot of cake (thank goodness!) and so we enjoyed it again and again (it last very well in the freezer).
On the Friday after my birthday we even had it with my favourite meal from when I was six (only this time I made it from scratch, just like the cake, rather than getting it from a restaurant): Pepperoni and Pineapple Pizza. Which we ate while watching 'From Here to Eternity' (GREAT film) and drinking "Crockford Mai Tai's" in bug cocktail glasses (another fantastic and fun wedding present)!
Next Time: A Valentine (or anytime) treat!
*update: my mum has just informed me that when I turned one and two I had a Raggedy Ann decorated cake
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