Brownie Ice Cream Torte - by Lisa

This recipe made one fantastically yummy dessert! When we were making our picks for the month, I chose this one and decided it would also serve as my birthday cake! And I sure am happy with how well it turned out! I'm glad Summer did this one before me, because I picked up a few great tips from her such as keeping a close eye on the timer in between layers and being extra diligent about finding a brownie recipe suited for a 9in pan. Luckily, I didn't have any problems finding a good box mix (I used the one that adds Hershey's liquid chocolate - yum!), but I did learn another thing or two about patience. :)

Brownie Layer Complete

 Apparently I was a little to eager to add the vanilla ice cream layer (which I ended up using a full pint's worth), and 30 minutes wasn't quite long enough to allow the brownie to cool. I didn't notice this until I checked the freezer progress where I discovered the vanilla ice cream had turned to soup on top of the brownie! Oops! No big deal tho, I made this the night before my birthday, so I just left it to freeze a couple hours longer. When it was ready, I added the raspberry sorbet (again, used the entire pint here) and left it to do its thing overnight.

The next morning I pulled it out to decorate! I thought about the ice cream cakes I've had in the past, and decided to pipe on birthday greetings with fudge in a pastry bag. I used the store bought variety, and discovered that it actually worked best after being left out to warm up for about 30-45 min. And I was worried that the fudge wouldn't be firm enough! LOL! I ended up changing how I decorated it because when I initially started, the fudge wouldn't stick to the sorbet. But after it had warmed up a little more in my hands, it started coming out of the pastry bag and behaving quite nicely. Unfortunately, I was halfway thru the message by this point. I also figured out as I was piping the border, that maybe I should do that after it is out of the pan. Sure enough, once we popped it out, all that fudge slipped right off! Oops. But now I know for next time how to better manage the decorating! And this gives me confidence to try making other kinds of ice cream cakes/pies in the future!

Birthday Torte!

Hubby, Son #1 and I all agreed that this was by far an awesome treat! Hubby particularly loved the combo of sweet and tart as did I. I am looking forward to keeping this one in my recipe go to list!

I think he might have liked it. Just a little. ;)