More cake!

"You remember Glynnis" I said to a disappointed Kate, who had just learned the cake I was making was not for her "she gave you that big box of paper to shred when you visited my office." Her eyes ignited with the glow of fond recognition. "That was a lot of paper!" I paused for a quick moment to reflect on the charming weirdness of her love of paper shredding. "Yeah, well, it's her birthday."

I had decided to make an ice cream cake. At first I was thinking I'd just do cake and ice cream, because I did know that strawberry is Glynnis's favorite flavor. But then I thought it would be fun to the put it all together. Not only have I never made an ice cream cake, I've never liked ice cream cake. I'm not sure what came over me, really. Still, it was a fun experiment. I'd looked for some sort of write-up on the topic of ice cream cake-making. The instructions I liked best were only sort of what I planned to do. For one thing, they recommended using store-bought ice cream, which I thought was the very height of laziness since homemade ice cream is easier to make than most things I slap between layers of cake and tastes infinitely better.

Here is what I realized entirely too late - homemade ice cream lacks the added ingredients that cause the dairy confection to freeze so thoroughly you may have to leave it sitting on the counter for 20 minutes just to be able to scoop it out. Indeed, homemade ice cream wants nothing more than to melt at the mere mention of exiting the freezer. As I iced my creation, it seemed to be sweating. Pink sweat. I was forced to admit that store-bought ice cream has its merits.

So here it is - you'll notice there's little fanfare but that, of course, is due to the finite time alotted for the decorating process. The end-result was met with happy forks. To my surprise, Glynnis had been wanting an ice cream cake since she saw her sister's earlier this year. Guess I just caught that vibe.