Ice Cream Cake for the 4th!

By Carly

Here’s a simple Q&A to get this party started.

Q: What’s better than ice cream?

A: Ice cream cake, of course.

Q: What’s better than ice cream cake?

A: Ice cream cake that’s not very bad for you—low-guilt ice cream cake, if you will.

Q: How are you going to impress your friends and family on the 4th of July?

A: By making them this beautiful, low-guilt ice cream cake!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, roll up your sleeves and get ready, because this is the simplest ice cream cake EVER. It has four ingredients:

• 1 pint low-fat vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt

• strawberries

• blueberries

• powdered sugar (optional)

So, here’s what you do:

First, slice almost a cup’s worth of strawberries (you’ll need about another cup of whole strawberries for the cake’s top). Set them aside.

Take the ice cream out of the freezer and let it get a little melty around the edges so that it can be shaped and molded. When it’s reached that consistency, slide it out of the container. Cut the ice cream in half lengthwise. Take one half and do your best to mold it into a rectangle shape with a flat top (a knife can be helpful here). Create your rectangle on a fancy plate or serving dish. That’s your first layer for the cake.

After you’ve built that layer, arrange the sliced strawberries on top. If you have too many strawberries to fit in a single layer, you can double- or triple-layer them so that they all fit, but keep the cake as flat as possible.

On another working area, mold the second half of the ice cream into a rectangle that’s as close to the same size and shape as you can get it to the first rectangle. Stick it on top of the sliced strawberries. If you have spare ice cream or if the ice cream is really melty, you can use the extra to fill in the areas between the two layers.

On the top of the double-layer cake, set the blueberries and whole strawberries in a nice pattern of your choice. Stick the cake in the freezer—it can stay there until you’re ready to serve it.

As you cut slices, sprinkle powdered sugar on top of them. Beautiful, delicious, and a heck of a lot tastier than fireworks.

[Photograph courtesy of Flickr.]