Frankenstein Cake

My mom gave me a cake decorating book and I made my first child's birthday cake last year - a puppy dog and little paw print cupcakes. I enjoyed the experience and thought I'd try making Ella's cake again this year. We've actually been looking through the pictures here and there for about a month now. Since her tastes are ever-changing, I decided to wait to let her choose a design right before her birthday. Then, one day I decided to ask her if she wanted an ice-cream cake. The girl loves all things ice cream. She got excited, so I started making plans.

I researched all kinds of recipes on the internet, asked Tim what he preferred, and then did a facebook flavor survey. Once I decided to go vanilla ice cream with crushed oreos, fudge, and caramel, I only needed to select the size cake. I'm not sure why, but I can never just do the simple thing in these circumstances. When I counted the number of potential guests, a regular cake just didn't seem enough. So, I pulled out 3 round cake pans, each smaller than the next and decided to make a three-tiered ice-cream cake.

The ingredients are not tricky, but the process is time-consuming and you've got to work quickly. Patience and a deep freezer are also helpful. Everything actually went fairly well, except I overdid things a bit with the fudge and caramel. The problems came at frosting time because I had to frost and freeze, frost and freeze. My sister, Merilee, gave me a delicious, light frosting recipes that combines cool whip and pudding mix. So yummy! I frosted my layers, but they were uneven and unimpressive.
I should have left well-enough alone, froze this, then added m&ms as planned around the layers with "Happy Birthday!" on top.

I decided to solve this by adding canned whip cream around the layers for a "decorative effect." By this time, I had some melting issues as well. After a bit more freezing, I decided to remove the whip cream decoration. To fix this fiasco, I had to add more frosting. Consequently, I ended up with more of an ice cream cake mountain, than the 3 tiered cake I envisioned.

This doesn't look as bad as I remembered, but oddly, I think the picture is being a bit kind.

I added m&m rings to try to define the layers, then placed the cake back in the freezer, my heart sinking. I peeked at the cake throughout the day until - suddenly - it hit me! My mountain could be transformed into a princess cake with a doll on top! The end result is definitely not the refined cake I imagined, but Ella was pleased and there was no freezer-burn in sight! I think it actually tasted a bit like Red Robin's Mile High Mudd Pie in the end.

Princess cake turned out cool, although the dripping filling and sliding m&ms leave alot to be desired!
Ella liked it, but she didn't get to see the "princess" for long because we didn't want the cake to melt. Oh, well. She was happy and I had a fun experience making this!

An inside view after it melted a bit, but you get the idea.

Next time, however, a little more technique and a little less experimentation are in order.