During my rambles around the Internet, I spotted various claims along the lines of: you can add self-raising flour to ice cream and then bake to get a cake. Two ingredients. Two minutes to make the mixture. Hardly any mess.

I was incredulous. I had to try it.

And, lo! It works!

I used 400 g of soft scoop vanilla ice cream and 200 g of self-raising flour. I didn’t have to leave the ice cream to melt as it was already soft and the flour stirred in easily. I spooned the mixture into a loaf tin and baked at 180 degree C for 30 minutes until golden brown, like this:

When it had cooled, I decorated it with royal icing and some sugar stars.

A tip when it comes to cake decorations/sprinkles. I picked up a few pots of decorations in the supermarket “baking” section. Later, I wandered down the dessert aisle (where they sell ice cream cones…) and noticed they sell sprinkles/decorations for ice cream at half the price the same things are sold for in the baking section.

I will say that this is not the best cake I’ve ever made. It’s dense and bordering on “bready”. However, if you used better quality ice cream or one with more flavour (Belgian chocolate, mint, raspberry ripple, etc.), I think you could make something quite interesting. You could also add chocolate or nuts to the mixture.

For me, this was a low-cost experiment to convince me it could work. Now I know it does, I’ll try and do something more interesting with the basic idea in the future.

© Claire Huston / Art and Soul