Making chocolate wafer cookie for my son’s ice cream cake was a bit different from the kinds of cookies I normally make. Wafer cookies need to be cooked long enough to be crispy and in my mind over baked. I am a huge stickler about over baking cookies because I like my cookies soft and gooey (they taste so much better). However, I had to go against my years of baking experience and “over bake” the chocolate wafer cookies! Once my over baked cookies cooled, my son and I smashed them into small crumbs, mixed the crumbs with melted butter, and baked the cookies again in a springform pan. There were quite a few extra cookies to my son’s absolute delight. He was even more excited when I told him that we needed to make the ice cream base; he still did not quite understand that I was making his birthday cake with cookies and ice cream. When we make ice cream my son loves to help stir the cream mixture over medium heat. Vanilla ice cream is probably one of the simplest ice creams to make. The only extra step (which is optional) is to steep stripped vanilla beans in the hot cream mixture for an hour or so. I was not sure how much ice cream I would need for the ice cream cake so I made enough base for at least six pints of ice cream. After that we tempered lots of egg yolks and stirred some more until the mixture reached the right thickness. While my son licked the pan, I put the ice cream base mixture into the refrigerator to chill overnight.
The next day we assembled the birthday cake. First we pulled out the ice cream freezer with all its parts and the frozen barrel out of the freezer. As I was pouring the ice cream base into the running ice cream making, I realized that the freezer was too small for all of the mixture that we made the day before. As soon as the ice cream was finished churning, I started laying the ice cream with tempered semisweet chocolate sheets (that I had made earlier).
(To be continued …)