BabyCakes Page 109: Mint Icebox Cake

Happy New Year!

We celebrated the New Years Eve holiday at home with friends. Always looking for an excuse to try a new BabyCakes recipe, I thought long and hard about the perfect treat for the occasion.  New Years Eve is a very festive holiday, and I thought it deserved an equally festive dessert.  Thus enters the Mint Icebox Cake.

I haven’t done many – actually now that I look at the book I realize I’ve done none – of the BabyCakes cakes, so I thought this was the perfect occasion to make one!

I started on Friday by making the double chocolate chip cookies (page 71), which were intended for piling between the layers and on top of the cake.  I also made the frosting on Friday to give it plenty of time to chill.  Then, Saturday morning, I made the cakes.

As usual, things didn’t turn out exactly like they were supposed to… you guessed it. The frosting. But I’ll get to that in a second.  The cakes were my first problem.

The chocolate mint cakes were divided into three pans as called for in the recipe. Confession: it called for 7 x 4 x 3-inch loaf pans to make a rectangular cake.  I didn’t have them and couldn’t find them, so I went round.  I recently read that Erin McKenna thinks you should always try the recipe as written first before deviating or getting creative.  I’m sorry!! But I don’t think they make that size loaf pan on my island.  So I went round.  Moving on…  The recipe also says “the cake may seem a touch underdone when the baking time is up, but trust me: you will have a beautifully moist cake that won’t dry out in the freezer, one you’ll pick at happily each time you pass the fridge for weeks to come!”

Now, I know I didn’t use the loaf pans but still, the baking times never work for me anyway. So I gave it ten extra minutes and then took it out.  Cut to the end of the story: when I flipped cake one, the still-batter-like middle stayed in the pan and the donut-shaped remains of the cake were on my cake plate. 

AHHHHHHH! I panicked, of course.  Assuming it was a lost cause, I put cakes two and three back in the oven (mind you they had cooled by this point) and baked until a toothpick came out clean. Why can I never try that in the first place?!

I was beyond pleasantly surprised when I flipped the cooled cakes two and three and the whole cakes came out clean! Hence, the two layer cake. Which turned out to be plenty of cake by the way.

Now, back to the frosting. Even after some time in the freezer it was still very soupy – as you can clearly tell from the photo below.  My guests thought it made the cake look more artistic.  I let them think it was that instead of my continued inability to make a reasonably textured frosting.

Regardless of aesthetics, I suppose the bottom line is the taste.  And it was yummy!  The mint was added to the actual cake (there was no mint in the frosting or the cookie layers) and the combination was very, very good.  Because it’s an icebox cake I served it out of the freezer, and as usual I think the temperature made it all the better!

Although, I must say… it would have been even better if the frosting had been stiff enough to slather it on even thicker.  As it was, most of it ran off before I could adequately layer, so it could definitely be improved with a more voluminous layer of frosting in the middle and on top.  Gotta master that frosting!

A very yummy New Years Eve!