Hedy's Mars Bar Ice Cream Cake

For my dad's birthday last week, I made my friend Hedy's famous, "Mars Bar Ice Cream Cake!"  She has made it many times before, but this was my first attempt to make it as well as she does. 

To make this cake, here is what you will need:

For the crust:

-1 1/4 cups of graham cracker crumbs

-1/4 cup sugar

-1/3 cup butter melted

For the cake:

-2 x 1.55L tubs of your favourite vanilla ice cream softened
-8 Mars bars
-1 jar or squeeze bottle of chocolate fudge sauce

First, make the crust in the bottom of a spring form pan as though you were making a pie crust, using graham cracker crumbs, butter and sugar. Let cool completely. Hedy likes to use Oreo cookie crumbs, but I used my favourite, graham cracker crumbs. Click here for more details on how to make the crust.

Next, freeze Mars bars for at least a half hour.  Break in half and crumble in food processor using the steel blade. Set aside in a bowl.

Let ice cream soften in tubs. Use half of one tub of ice cream.  Place in food processor and blend. Add half a cup of crushed mars and fold in by hand. Pour into a large bowl. Repeat for next three portions of ice cream. Pour half of the ice cream mixture onto the crust. Use a spatula to even out the softened ice cream mixture. Next, add a layer of chocolate fudge sauce.  Then, add the remaining ice cream mixture and top with remaining crumbled Mars bars. Finally, fill a piping bag with the rest of the chocolate fudge.  Drizzle over crumbled Mars bars.
Let set in the freezer for at least 24 hours.

If this is not delicious...

I don't know what is?

Happy Birthday Daddy. 

Enjoy everyone!
A perfect summer treat.

Basketball Cake Pops

How will you be celebrating Father's Day? Sports themed cake pops are a great gift for dad. This order was for a basketball junkie!

For these cake pops, I used chocolate cake mixed with cream cheese frosting. I began by melting orange candy melts and added a few chocolate brown ones to darken the orange color just a bit. First, I dipped the cake balls into the melted candy.  For basic cake pop instructions, click here. To learn how to decorate these cake pops, read below.

Once all of the cake pops were dry, I began to decorate each one. I used black royal icing to add the lines of the basketball. I place each pop into a styrofoam base, one at a time, so it would stand alone. Next, I marked the middle point on the top of the pop.  I then drew two lines that looked like a plus sign.  One was drawn from the left side to the right, and the other from the front to the back. Finally, I added a curved line to either side. It really helped to look at a photo of a basketball.  Another idea would be to use an edible marker to draw the lines on the cake pop first, and then trace over them with the royal icing.

A sturdy hand is helpful when adding the details.

I think they look adorable.

To make them even cuter, add a father's day tag to the lollipop stick.  Print any tag onto cardstock. Cut it out and poke two holes in the tag, one at the top, and another at the bottom. Slide through stick.

I printed these adorable, free cupcake toppers (that I used as tags), from Tip Junkie.

Enjoy!

Happy Father's Day to all of the dad's celebrating today!

Cookie Scrabble Anyone?

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to try making Scrabble tiles as part of my dad's birthday gift. Why, would this be the perfect gift for my father you ask? Well...let me tell you a little bit about my dad or "Tate" (pronounced "ta"-"teh,") as we say in Yiddish!

My Tate...

• 
  
  owns 4 Scrabble games, one of which is kept in his trunk
• 
  
  owns 3 Scrabble dictionaries
• 
  
  knows about 121 two letter word combinations
• 
  
  has scored 316 points in one game

I guess you could say that he just a little "Scrabble obsessed!"

Therefore, I don't think that this could be any more perfect!

But, before I begin, I have to give credit Bridget from Bake at 350, which is where I originally got the idea to create scrabble tiles a few months ago. Her blog is fantastic and her cookies look incredible!

I rolled out my dough as I normally do, and realized that I did not own any square cookie cutters. That meant that I had to improvise!  So...I used a ruler and a very sharp knife to cut vertical and horizontal lines to form square tiles. Rrrrrrrr....my squares were too big and looked more like rectangles!  I finally managed to cut away at the dough and cut the rectangles into smaller squares.  Yippee!  My tiles were cut.

Using an offset spatula, I individually placed each tile on a parchment lined cookie sheet.

The cookies baked for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees. 

Once they cooled, I piped and flooded each tile with white royal icing and let them dry overnight. 

The next day, I piped the letters that I would be using for the board.  My sister, (Scrabble player number 2 in my family), created the layout.  I told her that we had 42 tiles to work with and off she went!

Here's what we came up with!

I tried to resemble the "Scrabble" letters as much as possible. 

The numbers were the hardest to pipe, since they were so tiny.

They turned out okay!

Just look at the expression on my dad's face when he opened the box and realized that the tiles were cookies! Priceless!

We first gave him and Ada the opportunity to play with the tiles.

It took no time for my dad to use up all of the letters and to create his own board.

Of course he managed to have some fun along the way!

Here's what he came up with. 

And it took him not even 10 minutes to incorporate all of the letters.

And here's what we created.

Happy Birthday Daddy!