This was our daughter’s 10th birthday cake. Homemade birthday cakes are our family’s tradition. The kids find a cake for me to make, and I spend hours (and hours) making it.
I’ve made Harry Potter’s Monster Book Of Monsters, Thomas The Tank Engine, Princess Ariel, Donatello The Ninja Turtle and more. Although they are always an epic production, and a couple of them could have been used as those Memes that say “Nailed It!”, the look of love, amazement and adoration on their faces are so worth it.
About 3 years ago I really started to learn about sugar and the different illnesses it can cause if our bodies have too much of it. I also started to learn how it was in so many foods on our supermarket shelf. Combine this with the knowledge I already had about additives and preservatives, and I really had to change the way I made the kids birthday cakes. I had to find healthier ways to make the cakes they chose –
you see, now I have had my eyes opened to the world of sugar, additives and preservatives, I simply can not turn a blind eye to what I have learnt, and prefer not to expose my kids to this.
So I went on a quest to make this ice cream cake and topping from scratch so it was not only additive and preservative free and fructose free. If you’re interested, I’ve added notes at the bottom of this recipe post about why fructose free is so important and about the additives and preservatives found in store bought ice cream and ice magic.
Inspiration for the healthier version of ice cream came from David Gillespie’s book Eat Real Food and the hard shell topping I created from looking at a couple of Thermomix recipe sites.
This homemade ice cream is rich and filling because it’s made on full fat cream, full fat milk and eggs. You do not need to have normal cake sized slices because it’s so filling – trust us, we did that, and the only person who got through their whole slice was Israel.
The cake consists of 3 components – the ice cream cake itself, the chocolate hard shell and a sprinkle of ‘lollies’ – Indrani chose carob coated honeycomb chunks from a health food shop. We bought 7 of the them and cut them up into little chunks to sprinkle over the top. I also bought some beautiful fresh picked strawberries to put around the base of the cake. You could choose your own version of lollies and fruit to decorate the cake.
Ice Cream Cake Ingredients
I made 2 litres of ice cream for this cake. The ingredient amounts below are for 1 litre. I made it in 2 x 1 ltr batches so it froze quicker. I made the ice cream 2 days before I needed the cake.
For 1 ltr
- 600ml full fat cream
- 3 eggs
- 1/2 cup dextrose – you can purchase this cheaply from home brew shops or in the home brew section at your supermarket
- 300ml full fat milk
- 1/2 tspn vanilla powder – I use Honest to Goodness Organic Vanilla Powder
- 1 tblspn rice malt syrup
Ice Cream Cake Method
- In a bowl, whisk together all ingredients except the rice malt syrup
- Pour it into a saucepan, and over medium heat, whisk it continually
- Keep whisking but do not let it boil – just steam. If it starts to boil lift it off the heat to stop and then lower the heat, put it back
- You need to keep whisking until it thickens – it took me about 15 minutes. Test if its thickening by picking some up on a spoon – if it pours straight off, you need to keep whisking, if some of it sticks to the spoon, then it’s thickening
- Take off the heat, and stir in the rice malt syrup (this is to prevent it from going rock hard)
- Allow to cool for about 10 minutes then pour into a container and place in the freezer
- Wait 2 hours, then pull out and stir. Repeat this process until its like a soft serve ice cream
- Now it’s time to mould the cake into a shape. Take a bowl the shape you want your cake in, and layer it with glad wrap – you need to push the glad wrap down into the base of the bowl and up and over the sides a bit
- Take the soft serve ice cream and turn it out into the bowl with glad wrap, and smooth over the top – you want this to be flat because this will be the base of your cake. It doesn’t matter if the ice cream doesn’t fill the bowl. Place a plate over the top of the bowl – this will stop the ice cream getting ice burn on top
- Put back in the freezer and allow the ice cream to harden – I gave myself a day for this just to be sure
Chocolate Hard Shell Ingredients
The cake needed to have chocolate poured over it and for it to set hard. This made ample quantity for me to pour over the cake initially, and plenty left to pour over slices of the cake we had in subsequent days.
- 100g coconut oil
- 50g cacao powder*
- 3 tblspns rice malt syrup*
- 1/4 tspn vanilla powder
- pinch of salt (this enhances the chocolate flavour)
* Increase the amount of cacao and rice malt syrup to suit your tastes.
Chocolate Hard Shell Method
- Melt the coconut oil over low heat – you do not want this to be really hot
- Take off the heat, add the other ingredients and stir in until smooth
- Place back over low heat, and continually stir for about 8 minutes
- Pour into a sterilized jar, then store in your pantry until ready
Finished Cake Assembly
I did the assembly of the cake 10 minutes before I wanted to serve it. You will need to have your ice cream cake, your chocolate hard shell sauce, and your cut up honeycomb (or chosen lollies) ready to do the assembly quickly.
- Choose the serving plate or dish you want to serve the cake on
- Take the ice cream cake out of the freezer
- Grab the sides of the glad wrap and pull your cake out
- Invert it your serving plate or dish, and peel off the glad wrap – you should now have a beautiful dome ice cream cake
- If you’re having candles, put them in the cake now
- Grab your ice magic and the cut up honeycomb
- Pour your chocolate hard shell sauce over the cake – it doesn’t matter how you do this – it will look great regardless
- Quickly sprinkle the honeycomb over the chocolate hard shell before it starts to harden too much – you want the bits of honeycomb to get stuck in the chocolate
- Done – an amazing looking and delicious additive and preservative free, fructose free sweet ice cream cake with chocolate topping.
And this is why I endure those hours making their birthday cakes. Look at those faces – divine – Love beyond words.
Why Fructose Free Is So Important
This is a simplistic explanation but basically sugar is made up of 2 parts – glucose and fructose. Our tongue doesn’t identify the difference but our body does. Our smart body, is a perfect machine – it’s so smart, it separates out the glucose from the fructose as it heads towards our liver where sugar is processed (That Sugar Book describes our liver as a sugar sorting station).
Our body treats the glucose and fructose very differently.
Glucose
The glucose, is our bodies preferred energy source. It’s often called blood sugar, because it circulates in our blood as it travels to our liver. As glucose travels in our blood, it will be used either immediately for energy by the cells in our muscles or transported all the way to our liver.
Our smart body releases insulin to help regulate how much sugar we have in our blood. The insulin will unlock our cells to allow the glucose to enter them to be used for energy. If there is too much glucose to be used for what we need as energy, the insulin helps store the excess glucose in our liver, as glycogen for later use – like when we exercise or have not eaten for a while.
Fructose
The fructose on the other hand is quite different. It is not our bodies preferred energy source, it does not stimulate any insulin and goes directly to our liver. If our liver already has stored excess glycogen (glucose) which most of the time it does, the fructose gets immediately turned to fat. And this is why making a fructose free cake was so important me.
Our bodies really have not evolved too differently from the hunter and gatherer days, where they ate a limited amount of honey, fruits and vegetables in season and meats they captured. It was an active life – they had to hunt and gather their food. The body would efficiently use the glucose, store the excess glucose and fructose for later use. Keep in mind, there may be long periods of time where food was in short supply, so both the excess glucose and fructose would get used in these times.
In today’s modern world, sugar is now in 80% of products on the supermarket shelf and for most of the western world, food is in abundance. There is no real effort expended other than going to the shops (which I know with a toddler can be an epic exercise) in order for us to get this food. When you combine the increased amount of sugar and the abundance of food, then add it to the diminishing amount of physical activity due to technology and time constraints, you have the recipe for our current health epidemic. We are eating more fructose than our bodies were ever intended to process. This is playing out in our statistics – increasing obesity, diabetes type 2, heart disease, infertility, autoimmune illness (or in other words, illnesses they can not put a name to yet) and so forth. Scary isn’t it.
Today, many people of the western world are unconsciously eating way too much fructose which is accumulating in our bodies as fat. Even if there are no visible signs of fat on the outside, there could be still fat on the inside around. Quite simply we need to become more conscious about the amount of sugar we are consuming.
To learn more about sugar, I can highly recommend you watch That Sugar Film, and read That Sugar book. David Gillespie’s Sweet Poison and Eat Real Food are also exceptional books on this topic.
Additives and Preservatives In Store Bought Ice Cream
It would have been quite easy to make this cake from a 2 ltr tub of store bought ice cream by letting it soften then moulding it into a container, refreezing and adding ice magic and some M&M’s or something similar. But like I said, my eyes have been opened and I can not close them to what I have learnt – my kids are too precious to me. Here is what additives and preservatives I have avoided by making my own. Please note, the ingredients were copied from Coles Online website. The information about additives and preservatives was researched from the app Chemical Maze.
Streets Blue Ribbon Vanilla Ice Cream
Dairy ingredients (reconstituted buttermilk and/or reconstituted skim milk, milk solids, cream), glucose syrup (from wheat, contains preservative 223), cane sugar, gelatine, emulsifier (471), vegetable gums (401, 407, 410), flavours, colours (160b).
Reconstitution
Reconstitution means water has been added to some form of concentrate (usually a powder substance) so it resembles the original product.
To make a concentrate or powdered substance is created by extracting the water naturally contained in the product. The resultant concentrate left over after water has been removed undergoes a further process, usually involving heat, to turn it into a powder. To reconstitute it a similar amount of water that was removed, gets added back it to it.
I found this document about the chemical process of making powdered milk if you want to look into this further.
My personal preference is not to use reconstituted products because of the extent of chemical processing it must undergo. That’s just my preference.
223
The technical name for this is Sodium Metabisulphite. Symptoms could be allergic and hyper-sensitive reactions, asthma, gastrointestinal ailments, hayfever, headache and migraine, hyperactivity, skin ailments (eczema, dermatitis, itching, hives, rash etc). It is also prohibited in foods for infants. It is synthetically derived. The aim of adding a sulphite to a food is to preserve shelf life, stop food from growing bacteria and reducing spoilage.
I not interested in subjecting my kids to these symptoms (and who am I kidding, I do not want to deal with any of them as a parent), and as our birthday cake is not going to be sitting in our freezer for more than a few days, we do not need this kind of preservative.
470, 401, 407, 410
470 is an emulsifier which is designed to stop items from separating, and the others are thickeners or stabilisers. The only one Chemical Maze questions is 407 also known as carrageenan which is made from a seaweed and if contaminated with polygeenan, it may cause gastrointestinal cancer.
I am happy to whisk the ingredients together to allow the natural course of cooking to thicken it and stop it from separating. No need to add items made in a lab to this cake.
Flavours
Oh I do hate this catch all. We have absolutely no idea what is in this and labelling laws do not require them to tell us. I’ll leave you to read these blogs if you’re interested. Suffice to say, I am happy to go with a simple flavour using vanilla powder.
160b
This is also called Annatto Extracts. Symptoms include allergic and hyper-sensitive reactions, behavioural problems, hyperactivity, skin ailments (eczema, dermatitis, itching, hives, rash etc) and sleep disturbance. It’s used to give food a yellowy or pink colour.
I don’t know about you, but I quite like the natural white yellow colour that comes from milk, eggs and cream and I am not interested in having hyperactive kids or interrupted sleep.
Cottees Ice Magic
Vegetable Oils, [Protected With Antioxidant (319)], Sugar, Cocoa Powder (9%), Skim Milk Powder, Emulsifier (471), Flavours.
Vegetable Oils
This is such a catch all too. Marketing has led us to believe it’s healthy because it has the word vegetable in it. Here are a couple of great resources for you to review if you want to explore this further.
David Gillespie’s Books – Toxic Oil and Eat Real Food.
Sarah Wilson Interview – Is your cooking oil making you sick
Well Nourished – Naturopath Georgia Harding writes about – fats and oils
Skim Milk Powder, 471 and Flavours
Please refer to my comments in the ice cream ingredients.