Ice Cream Sandwich Cake

I saw a cake similar to this several years ago. Instead of looking up instructions on how to properly make the cake, I just made it. This is definitely one of the messier cakes that I've made, but it was a lot of fun to make!

The cake consists of two layers of chocolate cake, a layer of vanilla ice cream, and chocolate frosting in the expected locations. The version of the cake that influenced this messy cake was decorated like an Oreo cookie, so I kept that as a decorating guideline. Instead of "Oreo" I wrote "Happy Birthday" since it was for a birthday.

If you plan to make this, here are some tips: Make the cake at the location where the cake will be served; it will melt during a 20 minute car ride in the summer. Try to freeze the ice cream layer in a circle cake pan lined with wax paper so it has the proper shape. Be sure to rearrange the contents of your freezer before assembling any of the cake pieces. You can use any combination of flavors to make this cake; I'm guessing cookies and cream ice cream would be amazing!

Ice Cream Sandwich Cake
Two round cakes
1/2 gallon ice cream
One batch of frosting

Make your frosting.

Soften your ice cream. I'm assuming it isn't necessary to mix up the ice cream in a mixer, but it sure was fun. Such a lovely texture!

Place the bottom layer of the cake on whatever you plan to serve the cake on. Spread a layer of frosting around the sides of the cake. Either cover the entire top of the cake or just enough so the cake doesn't show under the ice cream.

Spread a layer of ice cream on the cake. (Or, if you followed the tip, place the layer of ice cream on the cake.) Place the incomplete cake in the freezer.

Place the top layer of cake on some paper towels. Spread a nice layer of frosting on top. Decorate however you want to decorate it.

Remove the bottom of the cake from the freezer and carefully place the top layer of the cake on top. Spread a layer of frosting around the sides of the top layer of cake.

Keep frozen until you are ready to serve!

Enjoy!

Note: The frosting that I used was the new Wilton Decorator's Frosting with 3 Tablespoons of cocoa powder added.


Used to create this cake: Food Network 9-In. Round Cake Pan. I love the Food Network pans from Kohls!

Apple Cake II

Yes, another apple cake. These old cookbooks have a lot of apple cake recipes, plus I still have a few bags of frozen apple slices in the freezer! Those need to be used up so we can restock the freezer with even more frozen apple slices. I'm also not brave enough to attempt strudel yet. I have a lot of strudel recipes, but they are all intimidating...

This apple cake is good. I can't really give a comparison to the other recipes since I make them so far apart. The best part of this cake is the crumbly goodness on top. The directions to assemble the ingredients were kind of weird at one point, but it turned out nicely. I also like that no mixer is required!

Apple Cake

1 C sugar

1/2 C shortening

1 egg

1 1/2 C flour

1 t baking soda

1/4 t baking powder

1/4 t salt

1/2 C milk

1 t vanilla

4 apples, peeled and diced

1 T butter, melted

1/2 C brown sugar, packed

2 t cinnamon

2 T flour

1/2 C chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a bowl, stir together the sugar and shortening with a fork until well blended and kind of fluffy.

Add the egg and mix until combined.

In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

Add the milk and vanilla. Stir until combined. This will be a thick and kind of dry mixture. That is how it is supposed to be, so continue on unfazed.

Place the flour mixture into the bowl with the sugar mixture and combine. Make sure it is decently combined!

Add the diced apples and mix.

In yet another bowl, combine the melted butter, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nuts. Stir until blended.

Pour the batter into a greased 9x9 inch pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture on top.

Bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. If you are using frozen apples, the baking time will increase a bit. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

Banana Cream Cake

A lot of my baking lately seems to revolve around what my little taste tester would like to eat. He loved the blueberry cake a few weeks ago. He also enjoyed the strawberry shortcake cupcakes. This week, I made a banana cake and he enjoyed that as well. He has also now started to say “cake”, so I’m doing a good job.

I’m not sure if I like this banana cake more than the one I made back in October. This one is nice and fluffy and very cake-like. The flavor is different enough from banana bread that you can tell it is supposed to be a cake. I can’t remember much about the previous banana cake except that it was delicious. I was out of milk, so I didn’t make the cinnamon frosting for this cake. Maybe next time.

Banana Cream Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Version)

2 1/4 c sifted flour

1 1/4 C sugar

2 1/2 t baking powder

1/2 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

1/2 C shortening

2 eggs

1 1/2 C mashed banana (approx 3 bananas)

1 t vanilla

Throw the first 7 ingredients into the mixing bowl and add 1/2 C of the mashed banana. 

Beat this together for 2 minutes. You may need to scrape the sides of the bowl after 30 seconds to make sure everything mixes in.

Add the remaining 1 C bananas and the vanilla.

Beat for another minute.

Pour into a greased and floured 9x13inch pan.

Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 20-25 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from the pan. Cool completely.

Enjoy!

Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes

It isn't quite strawberry season in Ohio, but the strawberries are on a buy one get one free sale. That means I can make lots of delicious strawberry desserts! My immediate thought when I saw this sale was to make strawberry shortcake cupcakes. So I did. And I'm very glad that I did. Doesn't it look delicious? It is very much.

I baked yellow cake from scratch for these cupcakes. I'm not sure that I like the recipe, but it goes well with the strawberries and fluffy white frosting. I may have overbeat the eggs into the batter because the cake fell a bit after baking. Instead of using whipped cream, I used a fluffy white frosting because I can't have too much dairy without getting sick. This frosting makes a good substitute for whipped cream; it isn't too sweet and is very, very fluffy.

Yellow Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Version)

1/2 C shortening

1/2 C butter, softened

2 C sugar

4 eggs

2 2/3 C sifted cake flour

2 1/2 t baking powder

1 C milk

1 1/2 t vanilla

Sift together the sifted-before-measured cake flour and baking powder. Set aside.

Cream together the shortening, butter, and sugar until well blended and kind of fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each addition. Beat until fluffy.

Alternate mixing in the flour mixture and the milk. The additions should be: flour, milk, flour, milk, flour. Be sure to mix well between each addition and after the final.

Scoop the batter into paper lined muffin cups. Fill the cups 2/3 full with batter.

Bake at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool completely.

While the cupcakes are cooling, slice your strawberries and make the fluffy white frosting. The recipe is from allrecipes.com.

Fluffy White Frosting (Printer-friendly PDF Version)

1 C sugar

1/3 c water

1/4 t cream of tartar

2 egg whites

1 t vanilla extract

In a small sauce pan, combine the sugar, water, and cream of tartar. Warm over medium heat while stirring occasionally. Heat the mixture until the sugar dissolves and the mixture starts to bubble.

Meanwhile, beat together the egg whites and vanilla until soft peaks form.

With the mixer on a medium speed, slowly pour the melted sugar mixture into the egg whites. Beat together for 8 minutes or until stiff peaks form. The frosting will be nice and cool by the time it reaches the stiff peak stage.

Assembling

Now you get to assemble the strawberry shortcakes. Excited? You should be! 

First, take a cupcake, peel the liner away from the sides, and set it on a plate.

Next, take a sharp knife and cut the cupcake horizontally into two pieces.

Place some of the frosting on top of the bottom half of the cupcake. Next place some strawberries on top of the fluffy frosting.

Replace the top half of the cupcake. Repeat the frosting and strawberry steps. You can even pretend you are able to make flowers out of the strawberry slices like I did.

Now eat a ton of these because they are delicious.

Enjoy!

Blueberry Cake

I recently offered to test out a blueberry cake recipe for someone. The recipe that I tested comes from AllRecipes.com. I love blueberries and blueberry cake seems like a delicious idea, so why not test out a blueberry cake? I made little teddy bears since the cake, if it passes inspection, will be baked in a My Little Ponies character pan. They turned out great and delicious.

This cake is kind of dense like a coffee cake, but it is very moist. The cake part is not very sweet at all and compliments the blueberry flavor. This cake would probably go well with a vanilla, lemon, or blueberry frosting. Reading through some of the comments on the original recipe post, a few people complained about the blueberries falling to the bottom and suggested adding them last to help prevent this. The final cake batter is thick and seems too dry, but it isn't. A few of the comments also claimed it tasted like blueberry muffins, but I think it tastes like a cake and not like a muffin at all.

Melt In Your Mouth Blueberry Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Version)

1 1/2 C fresh blueberries

1 T flour

2 egg whites

1/4 C white sugar

1/2 C butter

1/2 C white sugar

1/4 t salt

1 t vanilla extract

2 egg yolks

1 1/2 C flour

1 t baking powder

1/3 C milk

Place the blueberries in a bowl and gently stir in the 1 tablespoon of flour until evenly coated. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. While still beating, slowly pour in the 1/4 cup of sugar. Beat until stiff peaks form. Set aside.

In another bowl, cream together the 1/2 cup of sugar and butter.

Mix in the salt and vanilla extract. (I doubled the amount of vanilla. It is just something I commonly do.) Beat in the egg yolks until creamy.

In another bowl, stir together the flour and baking powder. Alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk to the sugar mixture. Be sure to mix completely between each addition. I did two additions of flour and one addition of milk.

Gently mix the blueberries into the batter (or do this after folding in the egg whites).

Gently fold the egg whites into the batter. Be careful not to bruise the blueberries unless you want bluish-purple streaking in your cake!

Pour the batter into a greased and floured cake pan. The original recipe says to use an 8x8inch pan.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 40 to 50 minutes if using the 8x8 inch pan or until a toothpick comes out clean. If you are using a different pan, the baking time will vary. For the teddy bears pan I used, the cake was done after 20 minutes of baking.

Let the cake cool for 10 minutes before removing from the pan. You can gently loosen the cake from the pan with a butter knife before flipping.

Enjoy!

German Coffee Cake

Here is another coffee cake recipe. You can never have too many of these. At least that seems to be the opinion of all these cook books. There are plenty more and they all seem to vary in some way. Luckily, all coffee cake seems to be very easy to make and, so far, they all have different flavors.

I'm guessing that the ingredient which made this coffee cake German was the nutmeg. I didn't use nutmeg when I made this recipe because most people around here don't like that flavor much. I just doubled the amount of cinnamon. I also didn't put nuts in it. Other than that, it is a very yummy coffee cake!

German Coffee Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Recipe)

2 C flour

1/4 t nutmeg

1/4 t cinnamon

1 t salt

4 t baking powder

3/4 C sugar

1/4 C shortening

2 eggs

1 C milk

1/4 C butter, softened or melted

1 C brown sugar, packed

1 C nuts

1/2 t cinnamon

4 T flour

In a bowl, stir together the flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Set aside.

Mix together the sugar and shortening until well combined.

Beat in the eggs for about 30 seconds.

Alternate mixing in the flour and milk. I did three additions of flour and two additions of milk. Pour this batter into a 9x13inch greased pan.

Stir together the butter, brown sugar, nuts, cinnamon, and flour.

Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture over the batter in the pan.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting. The cake is very soft and crumbly!

Enjoy!