TWD: Chocolate-Banded Ice Cream Torte!

This week’s TWD was chosen by Amy of Food, Family and Fun: chocolate-banded ice cream torte! Not all of the recipes in Dorie’s cookbook have pictures but this is one of the recipes that does, and it looks gorgeous! There are alternating bands of chocolate ganache and ice cream that just looked so perfect. I was excited to give this torte a try as I suspected it might be sort of like ice cream cake and we love ice cream cake at my house!

I decided to make two smaller tortes in my 4-inch springform pans because I knew those were more likely to be eaten than one large torte. Also, Dorie uses raspberry ice cream in her torte and while I think chocolate and raspberry would be a delicious combination, I knew Shane wouldn’t touch raspberry ice cream and I didn’t want to be stuck eating both tortes myself! So, I decided on french vanilla ice cream for our tortes. Originally I planned to make homemade ice cream to use in the torte but it just didn’t happen this time. I also used semisweet chocolate instead of bittersweet for the ganache.

The recipe comes together fairly easily. The hardest part is having the patience to wait for each layer to freeze before adding the next layer on top. I found it a bit difficult to spread the layers and make sure they were perfectly level in my small pans but in the end, they didn’t look half bad. I think this is the type of dessert that would impress guests as the end product looks so fancy and is so unique. As for taste, I thought it was ok. As much as I love chocolate, I often feel desserts with a lot of chocolate are too rich and this was one of those times. The ratio of chocolate to ice cream in my tortes was too high so the dominant flavor was definitely the ganache. Shane did like it though so not everyone felt the way I did. I think I’ll try to make this again sometime with a different ice cream flavor and see what happens.

Thanks to Amy for the pick this week! Check out her blog for the recipe and head over to TWD to see the other tortes!