Pumpkin Spiced Ice Cream Cake

Pumpkin Spiced Ice Cream Cake

Happy Autumn everyone!

I'm on a roll with the ice cream cakes! I wanted to improve on my first ever ice cream cake and I just couldn't help myself. This one is a totally different flavor and I think I got the cake and ice cream ratios just right this time. So I'm ringing in this Autumn with my autumn-colored autumn-flavored spiced ice cream cake! I could have very well called it spiced autumn ice cream cake or autumn spiced ice cream cake. But I chose to include pumpkin in there because the pumpkin ice cream inside had such an overpowering flavor and was really the show stopper. The pumpkin flavor was so strong that you could barely make out my homemade cardamon ice cream. I could have just gone with vanilla ice cream and it would have tasted pretty much the same.

Cardamon vanilla ice cream. This was an amazing flavor you guys.

I sort of cheated on this cake as well. I bought the pumpkin ice cream, the caramel sauce, the ginger cookies and the pumpkin spiced sugar cookies for decoration. All from Trader Joe's, of course. I made the chocolate cake, cardamon ice cream and whipped cream frosting myself. The cake itself was not as high and huge as my daughter's birthday cake so it was easier to handle. It was also not as intimidating when you served it. It made the perfect size dessert piece - not too tall and not too short :)

I baked my chocolate cake on a cookie sheet to get it nice and thin. By the way, this is also how you can make ice cream sandwiches. I didn't want a gigantic sheet cake so I cut my cake up and made smaller cakes. In fact, I cut some of it up to make ice cream sandwiches too so what was leftover for my cake was even smaller. Once all the layers were on though, I ended up with two decent size rectangular cakes. Again, there was a lot of in and out of the freezer so the cake would not melt. That really is the only tricky part about making ice cream cakes.

All layers frozen. Now, we're ready for frosting and decorations.

Here were my layers, from top to bottom:

• Sprinkles
• Whipped cream frosting, tinted peach
• Cardamon vanilla ice cream (homemade)
• Crushed triple ginger snap cookies
• Caramel sauce
• Pumpkin ice cream
• Chocolate cake

I had two cakes to work with so I took the opportunity to decorate the cakes a little different. One was coated with frosting all over and then decorated on the sides with the pumpkin spiced sugar cookies. The other cake had a clean cut all around to reveal the beautiful layers inside so only the top of the cake was decorated. I think I preferred the look of this version more.

Cake 1: top.

Cake 1: fully covered in frosting and lined with sugar cookies.

Cake 2: top.

Cake 2: clean cuts on all sides and then frosting only on the top.

If I could create the perfect autumn spiced cake, this would be it. I put all my favorite fall flavors inside the cake and the combination was exactly how I imagined it would be. Delicious! After making ice cream cakes, I'm beginning to think all other cakes are boring. Lol.