HOWTO bake easy, fugly ice-cream bread

Instructables user Phyllo has a brain-dead-simple recipe for a delicious sounding ice-cream bread: just mix equal portions of ice-cream and self-rising flour and bake in a greased pan for 30 minutes at 350F and voila! I think it's safer to call this "cake" than "bread," and it's a little fugly looking, but it sounds delish.

Ice Cream Bread -- ka-POW! (Image: NutritionMan)

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Gutierrez

It’s only fugly if you cooK it without a bread pan.
Anonymous

Heh. Yeah, its not really bread or cake, but more of a biscuit or tea scone. But this was to enter into the instructables bread contest, so I used the name with which my friend introduced it: Ice Cream Bread.

There’s lots of speculating on here; why not take the empirical approach and test out your various theories? (Spoiler: most of your theories are correct.)

Anyway, thanks for the attention. I do crave it sometimes :P

–Phyllo
Wisco

Ingenious! The ingredients bring to mind cream biscuits, in which you use cream rather than shortening as the fat. And of course there’s no reason these couldn’t be made into a less fugly shape…

http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/12/cream-biscuits/
Rich Keller

Can ice-cream bread be used to for wafflecones?

I want to see Wil Wheaton wearing his Wil Wheaton shirt eating ice-cream out of a cone made with ice-cream bread.
redstarr

My uncle made this for me all the time when I was a little girl. We used muffin pans,though, so it came out in much more attractive muffin shapes.
andrew2.71828

Mr. Cory — have you been drinking the cola covered in Mr. Mark’s recent post?
Anonymous

Bread and cakes are essentially the same thing, the dividing line determined by the speaker’s sweet tooth. Both of them are essentially wet flour that’s been cooked, anything else is making them fancy.

I used to make chocolate sponge cakes with self raising flour, melted bar chocolate and very little else. Utterly gorgeous and deliciously moist. Probably more sat fats than would be ideal, but if you just put in enough chocolate to equal the recipe’s sugar or fat requirement and then top the other up, the net damage should be negligible.

I’ve gotta try a yeast-risen rum and raisin version. Or an ice-cream sponge, if I can get that to work.
Anonymous

It doesn’t have to come out ugly. I tried it a few months ago when the recipe was going around the cooking blogs:

http://www.bakingaisle.com/2010/12/ice-cream-bread/
bonersimpson

I bet its super rich. Might try that out as a Valentine’s Day gift :D
Anonymous

FYI, the picture above is not from his instructable, but from someone’s comments. You can drop it in a greased bread pan like he promised.

Also, it doesn’t make a very sweet bread like you’d expect.
Anonymous

Looks familiar!! I used to make beer bread all the time in college. Sometimes when I was out of beer (or they wouldn’t sell it to my underage self), I’d substitute other carbonated beverages, like cream soda. I didn’t have a bread loaf pan, so I’d pour the batter out onto aluminum to bake.

I remember my dad coming to pick me up for Christmas vacation in the early ’80s and I was all, “Look dad, I made us a snack!” And I opened the oven and presented the cream soda bread amoeba, along with butter and cream cheese. He still makes faces when I mention it. I just sent him this link and promised to add “ice cream bread” to the menu the next time my parents come to visit!!

Grace
Anonymous

Der – deep fry it for kickass donuts!
SkyWhisperer

I made it, and it came out looking like a perfectly normal loaf of quick bread. The recipe was going around the cooking blogs a few months ago:

http://www.bakingaisle.com/2010/12/ice-cream-bread/
EH

Yeah, did this guy just plop the batter/dough on a plate or a pizza stone or something? I don’t think it qualifies as “fugly” if the person isn’t even trying.

P.S. Good thing I know to copy my comment to the clipboard when Boing Boing says my session expired. However, I worry that any complaints about commenting or accounts are heard only as votes for moving to Disqus and Facebook-only logins.
LYNDON

I tend to think the difference between bread and cakes is that one is leavened with yeast, the other not. But like the (culinary) distinction between fruit and vegetables, it doesn’t always work. Soda/quick bread on one side, say, and (IMHO) panettone on the other.

Interesting. Depending on the icecream additives may do some of the air bubble-holding work that eggs do in most cakes. Or if it’s posh, it might have actual eggs in it.

I’m guessing if you try not to let the remaining air out of the melted icream as you mix the flour in – folding it in – that will help the thing rise more (I assume this mix won’t get to the point where it collapses). Mix it as little as possible to avoid chewiness.
Cory Doctorow

Right you are — sorry, I mistook that for part of the main instructable!