How to Make the Ultimate Ice Cream Cake at Home

Hey, I'm John Cannell. And today, on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a delicious and dreamy ice cream cake. So, let's get started. First off, set oven to 350. We have one beautiful round of cake to make. Your ice cream cake can be any flavor you'd like. I love a chocolate cake base because it is so soft and pairs well with a ton of different ice cream flavors. If you're making your own cake layer, skip ahead to the time index below. Into a large bowl, I'm adding 1 cup or 120 g of all-purpose flour. The recipe I'm using today is the chocolate cake from the blog. I just decreased it, so I only have one cake layer to make. 1 cup or 200 g of granulated sugar. To puff things up, 3/4 of a tsp of baking powder.

And a quarter tsp of salt for some contrast. In case you haven't had an ice cream cake before, imagine a beautiful and insulating layer of cake topped with a thick layer of ice cream wrapped in whipped cream and decorated with hot fudge, Oreos, cherries, or whatever you like. It's the perfect summer celebration cake, and I love it for birthdays, too. Give it a sift. By the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new delicious recipes every single week.

This scale is done. Grab a whisk. Okay. Set that aside and grab another large bowl. Half a cup of milk. A quarter cup of oil. If you're making any other flavor of cake for this, it's important that you use vegetable oil or any kind of neutral oil instead of butter. This cake will be ice cold as it's topped with ice cream. So, if you're using butter for your cake, it's going to be really hard and not pleasant on the tongue. One large room temperature egg. Give this a whisk. This cake is beyond easy to make. And by the way, the recipe, which has two cake layers, is the perfect chocolate cake. At room temperature, as well.

We're going to give this a whisk, and you might notice in my hand, I have half a cup of hot coffee. You could use hot water or hot coffee. Both will be delicious, but the coffee will really accentuate the chocolate in the cake. Stir this together until it's just coming together. Now, we can add our hot water or coffee. Mix it up, and you'll think this is way too liquidy, and it's not going to work. It's going to bake up perfectly. That's very liquidy, but that's just how it should be. Grab an 8-in pan and give it a quick spray.

[snorts] Pop around of parchment on the bottom. And we're going to transfer the batter right in. Okay. Our cake is ready to go into the oven. 35 to 40 minutes at 350, or until the center springs back when you press it gently, or a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. In you go. While our cake bakes, let's handle the ice cream layer. Grab another 8-in cake pan, and we're going to press plastic to fully line it. Plastic in the other direction as well. You'll notice I have plastic wrap hanging out the sides.

This ice cream layer will get stuck if you don't have any leverage. So, make sure you have something to pull on. Okay. We're going to do a swap now. This goes into the freezer for 15 minutes and you're going to pull out the ice cream you want. You want 1 and 1/2 quarts of ice cream. Today, I'm doing chocolate cake with cookies and cream ice cream, but there are so many combinations. Choose your favorite, but here are some other ideas. You could have chocolate cake with a peanut butter ice cream, chocolate cake with chocolate cookie dough ice cream, vanilla cake with strawberry ice cream. You could have

vanilla or funfetti cake with vanilla ice cream or chocolate cake with mint chocolate ice cream filled with chopped thin mints inside. Delicious. Into the freezer you go. This part of the recipe is also known as the scoop and press. So, scoop the ice cream out and it should be fairly soft so you can get it out easily. Plop it in and you're going to repeat that until this is basically full. Then, you can get to pressing. Fill your cake layer up. When I was little, it was like the popular thing to get an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. So, this has a ton of nostalgic

memories for me. Okay. Cram that ice cream in there. Depending on which part of the country you live in, it might be Carvel that you've had. Once you've emptied out your ice cream container, we're going to grab one more sheet of plastic wrap, cover up the top, and get to pressing. It feels so wrong to like press the ice cream with your hands. This is so soft that it has to set up until it is rock hard. It's very similar to if you ever ate a baked Alaska cake base, ice cream dome top. This has a cake base with an ice cream flat disc on top. This is nice and flat, so it's ready to go into the freezer. This needs at least 2 hours until it is quite firm again. Feel free to make this a day or two in advance, so it's ready to go when

you need it. In fact, if you wanted to, you could have the ice cream layer and frozen cake layers ready for an on-demand ice cream cake. It's something you'd whip up super fast, and everyone will be really impressed. My ice cream layer has set up. My cake layer has baked and cooled, so we're going to assemble this beautiful cake. In the middle, we're going to have some room temperature hot fudge with some chopped cookies. This flavor combination calls for Oreos, and I want 14 of them, or about. That's about 160 g. Just give these a nice chop. You don't want giant pieces, cuz that'll make your cake difficult to cut.

Mhm. Thin Mints would be delicious in here, too. Roll is good. Set that aside. Grab a cake plate that you want to use. Center the cake layer on top of that. The glue that will hold our cake and ice cream layers together is hot fudge, or hot fudge sauce. It's room temperature, we don't want it to be hot. I want 1 cup of this, that's 290 g. And if you wanted to, you could definitely make a ganache at home instead. If you're making the ganache, just make sure it's room temperature, and it's a fairly thick one. So, less cream,

please. Smooth this out into one thick layer. Now, we can sprinkle our chopped cookies on top and press them in. Mhm. For other flavor combinations you can switch up the cookies. You can use caramel instead of hot fudge. Make this your own. It's very easy. It's just a matter of assembling it and making sure the filling isn't so gooey that it'll all flow out. All pressed in so head over to the freezer and grab your ice cream layer. If you're short on freezer space by the way, you could definitely assemble the cake on a cake board instead of on a cake stand. It'll save space and you can still move it around. Thanks to all the plastic wrap we used this comes out fairly easily. That's nice.

Remove the plastic, very important. Leaving the bottom on and I'm going to flip it upside down now. Just center it up and now we can use the overhanging plastic just to cover the cake so it's less exposed to the freezer. This should go into the freezer for at least an hour but you can make this a few days in advance. If you want to make it days in advance, wrap it really well with plastic and then wrap it with foil. Then take it out when you're ready to use it. Towards the end of the chill time I'm going to make the frosting for this, a delicious and easy whipped cream. My cake has set up so it's time to make my whipped cream frosting.

Two cups of cold heavy cream right into your mixer. The whipped cream is super light and it pairs nicely with the hot fudge and the cake and the ice cream. You don't want to add too much decadence onto this cake. Three tablespoons of powdered sugar and two teaspoons of vanilla. Pop your whisk attachment on and we're going to start low and gradually work our way up to high. Otherwise it'll splatter all over us And as it is, I might just grab a kitchen towel. This will only take about 3 minutes, so do not leave. And keep a very watchful eye, because whipped cream goes from being a liquid to churned butter in an instant.

And to make sure we have the perfect texture, we're going to stop this when we have very soft peaks and finish whisking by hand so we have the perfect consistency for piping. Yeah, so right now I have very soft peaks. And I'm going to finish this off by hand, cuz the rest comes together so quickly. Very drippy. It's almost there. Just from like 5 seconds of whipping. That looks good. Beautiful stiff peaks. I could eat this whole bowl. This is my kryptonite. I cannot walk away from whipped cream. Isn't that right, everybody?

I'm going to reserve 1 cup of whipped cream in a piping bag fitted with a closed star tip. I'm using an 846, but you can use any of your favorite star tips for this. Or not. You don't have to do any decorations. This will hang out in the fridge while I decorate the cake. Fresh out of the freezer, we're going to unwrap it. Now I'm covering the cake with the remaining whipped cream and I'm just going to give it a smooth. I'm using an offset spatula and a bench scraper for this, and I would just encourage you to give yourself some grace. You are not a professional bakery or a professional ice cream shop. So, this can look homemade. Move the whipped cream down to the side

and just get coverage. Once you have some good coverage, we can give this a nice smooth. If you have any cookies or hot fudge poking out of the middle, poke them right back. Smooth the top by pulling it in. And we're going to have some hot fudge on this, too, or warm fudge. So, this cake is getting a lot of coverage. Don't worry about making this a perfect cylinder. I'm telling you myself that as much as you. Okay. Once your cake is covered in whipped cream and it's been smoothed out, you have a choice. You could add crushed cookies onto the edge of it, sprinkle that all over, serve it plain,

could add a couple dollops of whipped cream on top, but if you're going to add more substantial decorations like we're going to do with a hot fudge drip and the rest, your cake should go back into the freezer to set up for 45 minutes to an hour. Then it can come back out and support the added weight from the decorations. The whipped cream is so soft, it'll fall apart if you don't do that. My cake just came out of the freezer, so now we can do a warm fudge drip without worrying about everything collapsing. Warm up some hot fudge or ganache so it's warm, but not hot. You want it to be just warm enough to flow, but not so hot

that it'll melt through whipped cream or streak all the way down to the bottom. You wouldn't need more than a quarter of a cup, really about 3 Tbsp for the strip. Snip the tip off your piping bag. And now, we're just going to pipe right along the edge, so we get a cute little drip. This is a very fake, contrived drip, so just add more where you want the drip to be. You can pipe a band, and then come back reinforce the drips that you want. Just for balance, I'm going to add some crushed cookies along the very bottom for a little skirt.

Grab a handful and gently press against the bottom of your cake, but be gentle cuz this whipped cream is so soft. You can throw the crumbs at it as well. For the top, you could add a rope, you could add dollops, or you could add a wave. I'm going to go for something in between. My cake is done. It looks beautiful, and now, this would last in the freezer for about 2 weeks. I would cover it loosely right after it freezes through, so it doesn't absorb any smells. If your freezer is really intense, you might want to let your cake sit on the counter top for about 5 minutes just to soften up for easy slicing. Otherwise, bring it right out, give it a slice, and just like that, it's ready to enjoy.

That is nostalgic perfection, and so much better than any of the store-bought ones I had as a child. The chocolate cake is soft and melt in your mouth. The fudge is silky, crunchy cookies in between, and of course, a big slab of ice cream covered in whipped cream on top. Perfect for any celebration. I hope you get a chance to make this delicious recipe, and if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button and check out my party playlist.