Three-layer brownie mint-ice cream cake

Time to talk cake - ice cream cake!  I love that my son's birthday falls in June - it's perfect ice cream season.

Brownie, mint chocolate-chip ice cream, and peppermint ganache topped with crushed Thin Mint cookies

Ice cream cake was always my favorite kind of birthday cake growing up.  It makes sense since my birthday's in August but given how much I love ice cream, I'd have wanted ice cream cake for my birthday even if it happened to be in January!  My now 8-year old is an equal fanatic when it comes to ice cream and this is the third year in a row that I've made some kind of ice cream cake concoction to celebrate his big day.

Two years ago, I simply stacked 3 layers of ice cream together in a loaf pan and topped it with some melted chocolate and sprinkles.  Last year, I got a tad more adventurous and made a 3-layer coffee ice cream cake for the birthday boy.  The child is a big fan of coffee ice cream, cookies, and such!  That cake had a base layer of dark, dense chocolate cake, followed by coffee ice cream, and another layer of chocolate ganache.  It was scrumptious and I used that framework for this year's ice cream cake.

The difference is I went with a brownie base this time instead of the cake.  While the fudgy chocolate cake was possibly the best part of that ice cream cake for me last year, it was very difficult to cut.  I got to thinking of making a thin brownie layer instead; I mean, you just can't go wrong with brownies and ice cream, right?  Right!

As you can probably tell just by looking it, the cake is simple to put together but I'll tell you all about it anyway because I could talk about food all day long...

I started with half a recipe of this brownie cake, which is just the Smitten Kitchen brownie recipe baked in the round.  (Incidentally, I think it just might be my favorite brownie recipe and that's saying a lot because I love them all!)  Half a recipe makes a nice thin layer at the bottom of this ice cream cake (after all, it's about the ice cream).  You just need to take care not to over-bake the brownie.  It takes only about 10 minutes in the oven to bake this thin portion in a 9-inch springform pan.  And the brownie bottom did turn out much easier to slice.

In an ideal world, I'd fill this cake with homemade ice cream but in reality, this is a crazy time of year and I'm grateful to use some good store-bought stuff.  If I went homemade, I'd have to make more than one batch to fill this cake since you need at least 3 pints of ice cream for the cake.  This year, we decided to go with mint chocolate-chip ice cream.  It's another one of the birthday boy's favorite (and mine, too).  We talked about maybe going with vanilla next year for a classic spin.

The crushed Thin Mint cookie topping was a big hit with the birthday boy!

To finish this cake, I added a top layer of dark chocolate peppermint ganache.  I think a ganache topping is great not only because it is rich and delicious but because it stays so soft and easy to cut through and eat.  I thought about making a mint brownie base but decided not to so I thought a touch of peppermint flavor to the ganache would be nice.  Knowing I was going to make this cake for my son's birthday, I saved a few Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies to crush up and decorate this cake with.  Some colorful sprinkles always make a birthday cake better, too.