Inventive Ice Cream Desserts

Is there truly a better dessert than ice cream? Granted, there are many desserts out there. History has granted bakers a great number of opportunities to create and craft something truly marvelous. And while there are some enormously beautiful and delicious cakes and pies and the like, ice cream is the dessert.

Like the wheel, it is hard to improve ice cream...

But society went ahead and tried anyway.

There are numerous ways to incorporate ice cream into any number of desserts, but these are several through which you can enjoy delicious ice cream in a new, creative way. Prepare to rediscover a classic.

Pie a'la Mode

One of the great ice cream desserts, this classic is versatile, and can be served in numerous conditions. While vanilla or strawberry ice creams are the norm for this treat, it can be served with any ice cream flavor.

As for the pie, apple? Pumpkin? It hardly matters. Nothing goes better with fresh out-of-the-oven pie than a scoop of ice cream, spreading its delicious flavor over the whole scale as it permeates through the whole thing. The flavors alone – along with the soft-then-hard texture – makes this perfection.

Cupcakes with Vanilla Ice Cream Frosting

Cupcakes are a fun, easy recipe. For some bakers, it's the first dessert they make. So what better way to enhance the cupcake eating experience than to add ice cream into the mix?

To turn ice cream into icing, you need to dump the ice cream into a blender. Beat it for a few minutes to get air into it. From there, it should be cold, retain its shape, but be malleable and easy to manipulate. If you have freshly baked cupcakes, put those in the freezer to make it nice and cool. Once your cold cupcakes are ready, put that ice cream-frosting on top. You have your ideal dessert, right there! Enjoy!

Oh, though you may want to put the now frosted cupcakes back in the freezer, just so that ice cream won't melt. Just a bit of advice.

Floats

The root beer float is one of the most classic of all desserts. Reminiscent of 50s diners and Grease knock-offs, the float is a classic dessert.

And easy to make.

Here's all you need to do. Take soda. Could be root beer. Could be a lemon soda. It needs to be fizzy and carbonated. Then, you take a scoop of ice cream – typically vanilla ice cream – and plop a scoop of it on top. Once it starts melting into the drink, you drink.

This is incredibly unhealthy, but you know that going in. Don't make it a staple of your diet, but enjoy it all the same.

Shortbread with Oranges and Honey

This is pretty straight forward. Cut up some oranges. Get shortbread. Add a scoop of ice cream. Pour honey over everything. Serve.

Now, shortbread is a far more subdued dish in general. I recommend vanilla ice cream for this treat, as the subdued flavors blend well with both the sliced orange and the honey. It produces a sweet, but mellow, dish.

Ice Cream Truffles

Ice cream is amazing. Truffles are pretty great too. So what if you could somehow combine the two together?

It's all a matter of making balls of ice cream, freezing them up, and then rolling them on ground up desserts. Combine the sweet yet subdued flavors of generic granola bars, and combine them with ice cream. Mix them up with some white chocolate, and you're in for a treat.

Vanilla-Orange Freeze

This treat is more of a pie than a straight-up ice cream dessert. Take ice cream – beaten in a blender so you can pour it – and dump it over a mixture of orange juice concentrate and water.

Then freeze.

The result is a delicious pie dessert – ice cream on top, and the sweet floor of orange along the bottom. The subtle flavor of vanilla mixed with the intense sweetness of orange juice truly gives this treat its signature flavor: a mix of sweet and sweeter.

Tiramisu

A classic dessert, tiramisu is typically a dessert that utilizes an egg-milk-cream combination as a core ingredient. However, you can substitute that with vanilla ice cream instead for a sweeter, more ice cream-centric dish.

Simply make your tiramisu as you normally would, dipping your ladyfingers in an espresso-rum/brandy mixture. However, while in traditional tiramisu you would layer the cake with an egg-milk-cream mixture, you instead scoop on whipped ice cream instead (putting it through the beater once again for a couple minutes). From there, raise the cake up with ladyfingers and ice cream as much as you see fit.

Caramel-Almond Ice Cream Torte

Fewer desserts look as beautiful as the caramel-almond ice cream torte. There is something about the sheer beauty of it – chilled perfection, one might say – that makes the mouth water and the eyes overflow with overjoyed tears at its beauty.

This delicious treat is easy to make. Take a carton of ice cream – slightly softened – and spread it in a pie tray. Make sure the ice cream is soft enough to manipulate, but cold enough to retain its shape. Then, freeze.

Once you have it frozen after 10 or 15 minutes, you pour melted caramel over the top. Lay it on thick. Then, sprinkle chopped almonds over the whole thing. Once you have it all set up, put that delicious ice cream dessert back in the freezer. Keep it cold until serving.

Mint-Chip Ice Cream Pie

This chilly pie requires very little work to perfect. You need to construct the crust of the pie. This is done by dumping Rice Krispies into freshly melted chocolate. Mix until it's all well and combined.

Line it along the border of a pie tin, and then dump in your mint-chip ice cream. Put that bad boy in the freezer for awhile, and, when ready, serve.

The brilliance to this dish is that it is, in essence, just a pie. A damn fine pie, but a pie all the same.

Mixed-Berry Shake

This blender treat is delicious and easy to produce. You have a blender? You have a sweet ice cream? You have lots of berries? Well, dump it all in a blender, and let it mix. Let it mingle.

Let it thicken and make a perfect dessert shake.

This ice cream dessert is one of the few you should drink rather than take out the silverware to consume. It's heavy, but the real kick comes from the flavor of the berries. The variations are endless depending on what ice cream and what berries you include. I suggest you experiment. Try new things. There is much you can do with this.

Strawberry Ice Cream Sandwiches

Ice cream sandwiches tend to be uniform. Chocolate cookie top and bottom. Vanilla ice cream. Sure, that's good for most people, but you're an adventurer! You want to step out on the frontier!

It's time to make a difference.

Make flat cookie waffers – whatever variety you want – and shove any kind of ice cream you want between them. Honestly, strawberry is a good blend with vanilla cookie exteriors (just plain, simple, no chocolate), but you can do whatever tickles your fancy.

Ice Cream Sandwich Cake

You like ice cream sandwiches? Ever notice how, when you pile one on top of the other, they almost seem to make a tower? The solid batter of the surrounding bars, and the ice cream loaded between?

You have your bricks. Now it's time to apply mortar.

Pile your ice cream bars side by side, and apply frosting between, gluing them together in a sort of ice cream sandwich cake. Simple. Effective. Delicious. Add chocolate shavings, and you're good to go.

Fruity Ice Cream Cups

A simple mix for those in a hurry. You've probably had variations of this over the course of your lifetime.

You take a bunch of fruits – be they berries, slices, or what have you, and you put it under a scoop or two of ice cream. For extra aesthetic purposes, flatten the ice cream on top so it covers up the contents of the cup like freshly fallen snow packs down on grass.

From there, eat. As you scoop into it, the flavors will blend together in an enriching, delicious manner.

Berry and Ice Cream Shortcake

Fruit short cakes are among the most delightful desserts out there. The natural fruity sugars are what make it so good. It's sweet, but not sickeningly sweet like icing or chocolate can be in large quantities.

But a scoop of ice cream, drawn with a heated spoon, does wonders to improve the sweets. Warm short cake. Cold ice cream. Blended together, you are left with a surge of flavor in your mouth sure to overwhelm your tastebuds in ecstasy.

Ice Cream Cake

A simple. A classic.

Everyone loves ice cream. Everyone loves cake. why not combine the two together, then, and create a cake from ice cream? Whoever first thought of this concept deserves a medal.

Though ice cream cake is really a catch-all term for any cake designed with ice cream as a core ingredient. All the same, through numerous iterations, it is an essential snack.