Making a homemade ice cream cake is super easy and quick, especially if we use ready-made ice cream. It’s a dessert perfect for summer, which can be prepared for parties, birthdays, or to offer a snack that’s a bit different from usual. To prepare a homemade ice cream cake, we basically only need 2 ingredients: ice cream (which we can also make ourselves) and cookies (shortbread, ladyfingers, etc.), or sponge cake, biscuit dough, and so on. We can use any ice cream flavors we like, perhaps more than one, personalizing it according to our tastes, thus offering a fresh and always different dessert each time. For an extra idea: we can line the sides of the mold with cookies as well, making an even more beautiful and scenic dessert. This delicious ice cream cake can also be made with gluten-free and lactose-free ingredients, and the result will be guaranteed and amazing, just like traditional ice cream cakes.
- Difficulty: Very easy
- Cost: Cheap
- Rest time: 1 Hour
- Preparation time: 20 Minutes
- Portions: 8
- Cooking methods: No cooking
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: Spring, Summer
Ingredients
- 18 oz ice cream (in the preferred flavor and also lactose-free)
- 14 oz cookies (also gluten-free)
- to taste almonds (for decoration)
- to taste chocolate chips (optional)
- 1 coffee cup cold milk (also lactose-free)
Tools
- 1 Mold 8-inch springform
Steps
Prepare the mold of 8 inches.
Line it with parchment paper and completely cover the bottom with cookies, filling any gaps between cookies with some coarse crumbs from the same. Brush the cookies with cold milk to ensure they don’t remain too hard.
Leave the ice cream out of the freezer for about ten minutes to soften just enough to spread easily over the cookie base.
Cover the cookies with ice cream (we can use two flavors, alternating them), smooth it well, and immediately put the ice cream cake back in the freezer, covered with plastic wrap, leaving it there for about an hour. It’s ready to serve, but we can add an optional decoration.
For the decoration I did this: on the surface of the ice cream cake (vanilla flavor, in my case) I added some dark chocolate shavings, almonds, and coarse cookie crumbs.
Along the circumference, instead, I “glued” some cookies, also previously brushed with milk, to ensure they didn’t keep falling off the cake. However, in this way, the diameter of the cake will increase, and we will need to transfer the ice cream cake to a larger mold, 11-12 inches, capable of containing it, without ruining the decoration and that can fit in a freezer.
If you encounter difficulties, no problem; you can decorate the edge of the cake just before serving it.
The springform base of the mold can also become a serving plate; or, before decorating the ice cream cake, we can detach it from the parchment paper and transfer it immediately to a plate that’s not excessively large, but that can fit into the other mold I recommended, the 12-inch one.
Oh… I almost forgot! Before serving it, leave your homemade ice cream cake out of the freezer for 5 minutes.
Both shortbread cookies and other cookies, like ladyfingers, for example, besides milk, can also be brushed with coffee or a syrup of water, sugar, and liqueur (5 oz of water, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and liqueur).
