Daring Bakers: Swiss Swirl Ice Cream Cake

Sorry for disappearing like that. The last couple of weeks have been fun - I'll post something about them once I have sorted through the pictures.

For now though, it is post day for the Daring Bakers again. The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home. The recipe can be found here.

My birthday is in July but I knew I was going to be out of town for it, so we took on this challenge as an early birthday party. We also, predictably, got somewhat carried away.

The first part of the challenge was to pick flavors. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately in this case?) the friend I was brainstorming with and I are both horribly indecisive. This lead to the idea that we should clearly create something like the cupcake version of the challenge so that we could make lots of different flavors. Initially we thought this meant making them in muffin tins. When we were ready to assemble them we decided it actually meant making them in mini-muffin tins. This produced ice cream cake bombs that were about 2 bites each. It was fantastic.

Step 1 was to shrink the swiss rolls. To accomplish this we scaled the cake recipe back to 2 eggs and baked it in a 10x15in pan (mostly because that was the size we had). We made a chocolate batch, a cinnamon batch, and a plain batch. We think we slightly overcooked the chocolate and slightly undercooked the plain, but we managed to get mini swiss rolls made from all three. For fillings we made mint-lime whipped cream, almond whipped cream,chocolate whipped cream, and chocolate-cayenne whipped cream. Trying to cut reasonably thin slices of these tiny guys with a knife was a mess, but dental floss worked nicely.


For the ice cream we made chocolate following the challenge recipe and then made the rest as custard based. The custard flavors were cinnamon (Note that milk, sugar and ground cinnamon produce a somewhat stringy mixture which is, unsurprisingly, reminiscent of cinnamon roll filling. It still freezes up reasonably nicely), cayenne (which was really interesting and turned out to be a friend's favorite), lime (like frozen key-lime pie filling, mmmm...), blueberry (I love berries so much...), and peach (obviously, given that I am in Atlanta). All came out delicious, though the chocolate never quite got hard (though it did thicken somewhat). For sauces we made butterscotch, fudge, and mango.


We made a cinnamon-almond swiss roll with peach and blueberry icecream and butterscotch sauce version in the muffin tin before switching to the mini muffin tin. The extra tiny ones were small enough we didn't want to take up space in the cup with the sauce, so we served them with the sauces. This meant that people got to choose their own sauce and was generally a wonderful time.