My son is obsessed with birthdays. He loves to see the birthday candles lit, he loves to sing, “happy birthday,” and he loves to blow out the candles. In theory he also loves to eat the cake but more often than not he will eat the frosting and leave most of the cake. Knowing all these birthday related thing about my son, I wanted to do something a little different for his birthday cake.
In preparation for my son’s third birthday, I decided to make him an ice cream cake instead of the more standard birthday cake. While my son did not quite understand the difference between a cake and an ice cream cake, he does understand what ice cream is because he loves eating it. Over the last few months he has “helped” me make many different kinds of ice cream: coffee, mint chocolate chip, peanut butter chocolate chip, bangkok peanut (for daddy’s birthday), and chocolate (one of my personal favorites). However, for my son’s ice cream cake I was going to make vanilla. As un exciting as plain old vanilla ice cream sounds, it is the perfect canvas for frozen treats and it has an amazing nuance of flavor all its own.
An ice cream cake is more than just ice cream of course and I had to figure out what I was going to use to build up the cake. In my mind a cookie crust is pretty standard for ice cream cakes, but I was not about to use pre-packaged sandwich cookies with their hydrogenated oils and other chemical additives. I needed to come up with some chocolate sandwich cookies from scratch. I found a simple recipe on line and with my son’s watchful eye and waiting taste buds, I began to pull all the ingredients together for the cookie dough. After chilling the cookie dough, we (my son is very hands on) rolled it out and cut out round cookies.
(To be continued…)