Neapolitan Swiss Swirl Ice Cream Cake

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

This challenge had lot of steps, but everything was easy, really fun to make and it looked impressive. I decided to go with a Neapolitan ice cream cake and use my favorite strawberry ice cream recipe. I had planned to make vanilla bean ice cream as well, but ran out of time and bought some Dreyers Vanilla Bean to use instead. I substituted a layer of my strawberry freezer jam for the hot fudge layer. Another change I made was instead of making two separate cake rolls as called for in the recipe. I just made one in an 18″x12″ sheet pan, which worked out very well.

The Taste of Home recipe uses Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls and ice cream and hot fudge from the grocery store, so it would be really easy to whip up this impressive looking dessert without even baking.

The flavor combination was fabulous, but the freezer jam was a bit too icy and I think it would be better to use a strawberry filling with a higher sugar content. I was a little leery about the sponge cake part of the challenge because it had so little flour, but the light airy texture of the cake was perfect when frozen, not icy at all and nice and chocolatey – a perfect match with the ice cream. I tried to cut it after only a couple of hours, but it was way too soft. In our hot summer weather it required an overnight stay in the freezer to firm up.

Visit the Daring Kitchen Recipe Achieve for the recipes, instructions and step by step photographs. Visit the Daring Bakers Blogroll to see the scrumptious Ice Cream Cakes the other Daring Bakers created. Thanks Sunita for a fun challenge. I recently bought a new ice cream maker, so it was fun to put it to good use.