day to day
Jan. 24th, 2006 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdI made ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
annathepiper an ice cream cake for her birthday. I do this most years, in fact - tho' some years I make an angel food/strawberry/chocolate thing that's really trivial and also extremely tasty.
On Anna's journal, I got asked how. It's not actually difficult; an ice cream cake is just a cake with layers of ice cream inside, and the key is to keep everything as cold as you can while working it.
Start by baking the cake layers as you would normally. Once they're fully baked, get them as cold as you can - freezing is good, refrigeration will do if you can get it down to near-freezing. Set these aside in the freezer or refrigerator and leave them there whenever you aren't working on them.
While the cake layers are baking - if not before! - get the ice cream you want for the ice cream layer and scoop it into the special pan you want to have in order to do any of this: the kind with a flat bottom and detachable sides. Here's an example of the type I mean. It isn't 100% vital, but it helps a lot. If you don't have and can't find one, you can get some cellophane and line a normal cake pan with it. This will be much more difficult because the cellophane will move around on you, making forming the layer very difficult, but can be done. A third alternative is to buy bottom-of-pan-only silicon liners, which should also work and are apparently more commonly available than I thought.
Regardless of how you set up the pan, scoop the ice cream into it and smoosh the ice cream into a level slab with a broad cooking spoon. I recommend using a wooden spoon, because it's insulative. One pint of ice cream gets you about a 1cm layer in an 8" round. You should use a high-fat-content ice cream for this for easiest working; other ice creams can be used, but will be more difficult to shape. Work quickly; you don't have a lot of spare time here.
Once you have the layer nice and smooth in the pan, spread more cellophane on the top of the ice cream itself - not along the top of the pan, but right on the ice cream, making good surface contact - and put it back in the freezer. You'll want to leave it there until it is hard to the touch. (How long this takes depends upon your freezer's maintained temperature. Thicker layers take more time, of course. In addition to getting warmer just because it was outside, the ice cream also got warmed quite a bit by the process of shaping it into a flat layer. You need to make it a solidly frozen object again.)
Once all the layers are nice and cold, stack them as per usual. The ice cream will come out of the pan as a reasonably coherent layer. If you didn't use the cellophane or liner approach, you may have to lever it off the metal pan with a very long knife, which is why you need a pan with sides that completely remove. (I cannot stress strongly enough how much a pan with removable sides helps here. Liners work too, but are difficult.)
Once the layers are stacked together on a plate, wrap the sides and top (again!) in cellophane and put back into the freezer until hard-frozen. This will take probably six hours; overnight is good if you've got the time or have a weaker freezer. Basically, again, the entire trick is to keep everything cold. Whenever you're working on it, you're heating it back up, so you have to alternate work and freezing.
Once it's completely cold again, take it out, and add icing and/or decorate as normal; serve immediately, or, again, re-freeze covered. (You may note that whenever the parts are in the freezer, you will want to insure they are covered. This prevents ice crystals from forming.)
I usually make a whipped-cream icing, from heavy cream, with a second flavouring element added. This year, it was raspberry spreadable fruit, scooped in in big spoonfuls while whipping the cream. I really strongly suggest real heavy cream for this; whipping it yourself only takes a few minutes with an electric mixer, and you don't need the pre-sugared pre-whipped stuff if you're adding anything at all to it. Ice cream cakes are very heavy and rather rich, so the lighter, unsugared icing helps balance the taste.
I guess that's it, really. If you want a rolled ice cream cake, the rules are the same; just have several thin layers instead of a few thicker layers, stack, roll, and cut. I've never done that, but the procedure should be pretty much the same. Oh, except you'd want to avoid freezing the cake layers, and you'd want the ice cream to be a little less hard when putting the layers together, so that it all bends instead of breaks, and the cake layers would need to be extra thin for the same reason. Again, high-fat ice cream would be important, just for the plasticity.
Oh, and if you're dealing with sliced cake layers, it can help to put a thin coating of something - I used the spreadable fruit - on the cake edges that are touching the ice cream. This'll help keep the ice cream moisture from seeping into the cake before you can re-freeze everything. That'll help if you are having trouble keeping the parts appropriately cold.
Bridging mushrooms and leaves, we have a mushroom in some leaves. I have several mushroom pictures; not enough to make them a full series (and give them their own tag), but:
Mushroom in Leaves
Sunday's token:: 0.1 miles
Monday's token: 0.3 miles
Monday's DDR: 2.1 miles! But I'm not really "dancing to Lothlòrian," so I don't know whether to count these. On the other hand, treadmill counts, so why wouldn't this? Also, I'd never done DDR on "workout" mode, because it's a game for me, but I tried it once to see what I was doing when I played and it worked out to "somewhere over 2.1 miles," since I did the sort of session I normally do, but shorter, and got that result. Sadly, being in "workout" mode means that you don't get the fun things from the game, so I won't be doing it much.
Miles out of Hobbiton: 579.6
Miles out of Rivendell: 119.7
Miles to Lothlórien: 346.6
Lakeside, Dark and Light
annathepiper an ice cream cake for her birthday. I do this most years, in fact - tho' some years I make an angel food/strawberry/chocolate thing that's really trivial and also extremely tasty.On Anna's journal, I got asked how. It's not actually difficult; an ice cream cake is just a cake with layers of ice cream inside, and the key is to keep everything as cold as you can while working it.
Start by baking the cake layers as you would normally. Once they're fully baked, get them as cold as you can - freezing is good, refrigeration will do if you can get it down to near-freezing. Set these aside in the freezer or refrigerator and leave them there whenever you aren't working on them.
While the cake layers are baking - if not before! - get the ice cream you want for the ice cream layer and scoop it into the special pan you want to have in order to do any of this: the kind with a flat bottom and detachable sides. Here's an example of the type I mean. It isn't 100% vital, but it helps a lot. If you don't have and can't find one, you can get some cellophane and line a normal cake pan with it. This will be much more difficult because the cellophane will move around on you, making forming the layer very difficult, but can be done. A third alternative is to buy bottom-of-pan-only silicon liners, which should also work and are apparently more commonly available than I thought.
Regardless of how you set up the pan, scoop the ice cream into it and smoosh the ice cream into a level slab with a broad cooking spoon. I recommend using a wooden spoon, because it's insulative. One pint of ice cream gets you about a 1cm layer in an 8" round. You should use a high-fat-content ice cream for this for easiest working; other ice creams can be used, but will be more difficult to shape. Work quickly; you don't have a lot of spare time here.
Once you have the layer nice and smooth in the pan, spread more cellophane on the top of the ice cream itself - not along the top of the pan, but right on the ice cream, making good surface contact - and put it back in the freezer. You'll want to leave it there until it is hard to the touch. (How long this takes depends upon your freezer's maintained temperature. Thicker layers take more time, of course. In addition to getting warmer just because it was outside, the ice cream also got warmed quite a bit by the process of shaping it into a flat layer. You need to make it a solidly frozen object again.)
Once all the layers are nice and cold, stack them as per usual. The ice cream will come out of the pan as a reasonably coherent layer. If you didn't use the cellophane or liner approach, you may have to lever it off the metal pan with a very long knife, which is why you need a pan with sides that completely remove. (I cannot stress strongly enough how much a pan with removable sides helps here. Liners work too, but are difficult.)
Once the layers are stacked together on a plate, wrap the sides and top (again!) in cellophane and put back into the freezer until hard-frozen. This will take probably six hours; overnight is good if you've got the time or have a weaker freezer. Basically, again, the entire trick is to keep everything cold. Whenever you're working on it, you're heating it back up, so you have to alternate work and freezing.
Once it's completely cold again, take it out, and add icing and/or decorate as normal; serve immediately, or, again, re-freeze covered. (You may note that whenever the parts are in the freezer, you will want to insure they are covered. This prevents ice crystals from forming.)
I usually make a whipped-cream icing, from heavy cream, with a second flavouring element added. This year, it was raspberry spreadable fruit, scooped in in big spoonfuls while whipping the cream. I really strongly suggest real heavy cream for this; whipping it yourself only takes a few minutes with an electric mixer, and you don't need the pre-sugared pre-whipped stuff if you're adding anything at all to it. Ice cream cakes are very heavy and rather rich, so the lighter, unsugared icing helps balance the taste.
I guess that's it, really. If you want a rolled ice cream cake, the rules are the same; just have several thin layers instead of a few thicker layers, stack, roll, and cut. I've never done that, but the procedure should be pretty much the same. Oh, except you'd want to avoid freezing the cake layers, and you'd want the ice cream to be a little less hard when putting the layers together, so that it all bends instead of breaks, and the cake layers would need to be extra thin for the same reason. Again, high-fat ice cream would be important, just for the plasticity.
Oh, and if you're dealing with sliced cake layers, it can help to put a thin coating of something - I used the spreadable fruit - on the cake edges that are touching the ice cream. This'll help keep the ice cream moisture from seeping into the cake before you can re-freeze everything. That'll help if you are having trouble keeping the parts appropriately cold.
Bridging mushrooms and leaves, we have a mushroom in some leaves. I have several mushroom pictures; not enough to make them a full series (and give them their own tag), but:
Mushroom in Leaves
Sunday's token:: 0.1 miles
Monday's token: 0.3 miles
Monday's DDR: 2.1 miles! But I'm not really "dancing to Lothlòrian," so I don't know whether to count these. On the other hand, treadmill counts, so why wouldn't this? Also, I'd never done DDR on "workout" mode, because it's a game for me, but I tried it once to see what I was doing when I played and it worked out to "somewhere over 2.1 miles," since I did the sort of session I normally do, but shorter, and got that result. Sadly, being in "workout" mode means that you don't get the fun things from the game, so I won't be doing it much.
Miles out of Hobbiton: 579.6
Miles out of Rivendell: 119.7
Miles to Lothlórien: 346.6
Lakeside, Dark and Light
