Our Ice Cream Layer Cake starts with a pre-made buttery pound cake with layers of your favorite ice cream! Get creative and use some fun flavors! Then you get to choose your favorite cookies and candy to crush up and throw in the mix!
They won’t believe you didn’t buy this at the store!
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Ice cream dessert always makes people happy! Not to mention, they are typically super easy to pull together and pretty difficult to mess up! Some of our favorite Ice Cream Desserts include our crazy popular Ice Cream Sandwich Cake and our S’mores Ice Cream Cake with its amazing graham cracker crust!
What Flavor Ice Cream Should You Use?
Some of our favorite ice cream flavors to use are Cookies and Cream, Mint Chocolate Chip, Cookie Dough and Butter Pecan. We also love to incorporate our favorite Harry Potter Butterbeer Ice Cream. It is totally homemade and delicious!
Why be boring with plain chocolate or vanilla ice cream when there are so many other great ice creams out there!
This is a great recipe for a birthday cake, barbecue, holiday dessert or just for someone who loves ice cream! (We made this for my son’s birthday party and they loved it!!)
This recipe was made by one of our best contributors, Nicole from Simple and Seasonal.
Cooking With Kids – This is the perfect recipe!
If you are looking to make something with your kids, this is a great recipe to let them help with! They will have a blast sprinkling all sorts of candy and cookies on top of the chocolate shell.
Let them get involved picking out the ice cream flavors and the candy toppings! They can also choose what order the layers should be while we stacked it all up.
When you go to the grocery store to get your ingredients, we used the Sara Lee Family Size Pound Cake from the freezer section.
Ingredients:
- 1 frozen pound cake – We used a 16-ounce family size cake (found in the frozen food section of the grocery store)
- 3 different ice cream flavors (about 1 cup each) We used Chocolate Brownie, Cookies and Cream and French Vanilla (Softened)
- 3 different candies (one per ice cream layer) We used Mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, M&M’s and crushed up Oreo cookies
- Chocolate candy shell (they sell this near the ice cream toppings and it hardens almost immediately after hitting the cold ice cream)
- Sprinkles (optional…. but I think everything is always better with sprinkles!)
How to Make a Homemade Ice Cream Cake
STEP ONE: Remove cake from foil pan and cut into 3 even layers. Cover bottom and sides with plastic wrap.
STEP TWO: Layer the ice cream and candy back in the pan.
Layer 1: Place the bottom cake layer in the pan & cover with ice cream. Sprinkle with candy.
Layer 2: Repeat with middle layer of cake.
Layer 3: Repeat with top layer of cake.
Top: Cover with candy shell topping and sprinkle candy and sprinkles.
STEP THREE: Place in refrigerator for 4-6 hours
(For the full ice cream layer cake recipe and step-by-step details, see the printable recipe card below)
Remove from the freezer, wrap up tightly and store in the freezer until ready to serve.
Once you’re ready to serve, remove from the freezer and pull gently on the plastic wrap to lift the ice cream cake out of the cake pan. Transfer to a serving plate and use a warm knife to quickly and easily slice through the ice cream and cake layers.
Pro-Tips:
- Let ice cream soften for at least 10-15 minutes so that it will easily spread along the cake. Trust me, this will make it easier to spread out when you are assembling the cake.
- Be sure to line all four sides with the plastic wrap (use two pieces and crisscross them. This will make it super easy to just lift the cake out of the tin pan.
- Before you wrap and put in the freezer, Place in the freezer UNCOVERED for about 5 minutes to quickly harden the shell and ice cream a bit. This will make sure the candy shell coating will not stick to the plastic wrap.
- Before you slice the cake, run the knife under hot water. It will slide easily through the cake
MORE NO-BAKE DESSERTS
Chocolate Lasagna Recipe | Eclair Cake | No-Bake Peanut Butter Balls | Edible Cookie Dough Recipe | Oreo Cream Pie | Funfetti Dip | Birthday Cake Oreo Balls | Hot Chocolate Dip
Easy Ice Cream Cake
Ingredients
- 1 16 ounce frozen pound cake (family size)
- 3 cups ice cream different ice cream flavors We like to use 3 different ice cream flavors about 1 cup each. We used Chocolate Brownie, Cookies and Cream and French Vanilla
- ⅓ 8 ounce bag Mini Reese's peanut butter cups
- ½ cup M&M's
- 8 cookies Oreo cookies
- chocolate candy shell
Instructions
- Remove the pound cake from the foil pan and cut it into 3 even layers (sort of-ours were hilariously crooked)
- Line the foil pan with enough plastic wrap to go over all 4 sides (this is to make it easy to cover and then remove from the pan later for slicing
- Place one layer of pound cake in the bottom of the pan and cover with 1 cup of ice cream. Sprinkle with candy.
- Repeat layers and top the last layer of ice cream with the chocolate shell topping.
- Before the shell completely hardens, sprinkle with additional candy and cookies.
- Place in the freezer UNCOVERED for about 5 minutes to quickly harden the shell and ice cream a bit.
- Wrap up tightly and store in the freezer until ready to serve. (approximately 4-6 hours)
- Once you’re ready to eat it, remove from the freezer and pull gently on the plastic wrap to lift the ice cream cake out of the pan. Use a warm knife to quickly and easily slice through the ice cream and cake layers.
Jenn’s Notes
- Let ice cream soften for at least 10 minutes. This will make it spread a lot easier!
- Be sure to line the pan with plastic wrap, it will make it much easier to remove from the pan.
- Before you wrap and put in the freezer, Place in the freezer UNCOVERED for about 5 minutes to quickly harden the shell and ice cream a bit. This will make sure the candy shell coating will not stick to the plastic wrap.
- Run knife under hot water before you are slicing it (this makes it slice easier)!
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Nutrition Info
Originally posted on May 18, 2016
I’m telling you, once you make our Easy Ice Cream Layer Cake, you will never, ever buy a DQ Ice Cream Cake again!
Very tasty cake! Thank you for such a detailed recipe! This is a really delicious recipe that my kids liked! You have a very exciting blog, I have found for myself many new recipes that I would like to try!
An interesting recipe! I will try to cook it on the weekend. Thanks you!