"Ice Cream" Cake

So it's Casey's 23rd Birthday! (Yay!.. I love birthdays). He asked me to make another ice cream cake for his birthday. But truth be told, I did that last year and it was WORK trying to ice that cake before the ice cream melted. Add the fact that we have a small freezer that is currently filled to the brim - it wasn't going to happen, sorry baby.

But I want to please my man so I did make him an "ice cream" cake, just not one with actual ice cream! The ice cream scoops are frozen icing. One of the scoops (the dark chocolate one) is actually a giant chocolate chip muffin (store-bought) that's been dipped in melted chocolate. The bottom was loped off to make it look like an extra large scoop of ice cream.

The inside is a layer of vanilla cake and a layer of chocolate cake. It's iced with homemade vanilla buttercream, topped with chocolate ganache. The ice cream scoops were scoops of frozen icing. Lastly, the giant chocolate scoop, as I mentioned earlier, is just a muffin top dipped in melted chocolate. I also had leftover white icing in my piping bag from icing the cupcakes, so I topped my sundae off with some "whip cream". You can decorate yours as you please. I think next time a maraschino cherry on top would really finish it off!

Not the best quality, but if this isn't heaven I don't know what is..

After looking at so many different melted ice cream cakes (like this one from One Charming Party), and melted ice cream cupcakes (ex. Confession's of a Cookbook queen's here), and cakes with ice cream cones around them, and cupcakes made to look like one big sundae (from OhDesserts), the best inspiration, and truly the parent of my cake, came from alanabread.com.

The one thing I especially loved about alanabread.com , was that it had the best way of depicting decorating instructions. I plan to use her method for all my future instructions. In my opinion, using a paint/ikea-picturesque diagram for instructions actually communicates the steps much better than photo-by-photo instructions, let me know if you agree?! (please!)