Healthy(ish) Homemade Ice Cream Cake

Some of you asked for the recipe for our homemade ice cream cake that I mentioned in the newsletter. Here are the details!

For my son’s seventh birthday, he requested an ice cream cake with candy on top. We live near a candy shop, and we let him choose the aquatic-themed gummies that went on top of the cake (nothing about this candy was remotely Good Stuff, besides the joy it brought him and his brother).

The cake itself wasn’t actually that bad, especially when you consider what’s in a Carvel ice cream cake! We followed this recipe, with the following alternations:

1. We used Blue Marble ice cream (which is organic…and $8 a pint!). You could also choose Alden’s Organic ice cream, or better yet, make your own ice cream and completely skip the white sugar. Here’s a truly easy recipe for making ice cream.
2. For the cake’s middle cookie crumble layer, we got natural chocolate wafer cookies (like these), and used this recipe to make our own chocolate shell. (The cake recipe calls for Magic Shell, which surprisingly didn’t include anything THAT terrible, other than lots of sugar and some soy lecithin. Still, I wanted to make an organic version with higher quality coconut oil.)
3. As for the icing, it was just whipped cream with a little maple syrup. Felix wanted it to look like the ocean (since the candy he chose was under-water themed), and my husband was worried that we wouldn’t be able to get natural food coloring that would be the right color. I proved him wrong, though, and a mere $20 later, I had some natural food coloring that really worked!

If you’re keeping track, you’ve probably realized that this cake cost nearly $100 to make! If you’ve attempted a homemade ice cream cake, comment below on lessons learned and what you spent:).

Stay sane,