Salted Caramel, White Chocolate & Pecan Ice Cream Loaf Cake

I can hear your minds working on the title for this post.

Salted caramel? Good.
White chocolate? Good.
Pecan? Good.
Ice cream... loaf cake? Interesting...

There is a back-story to this post. The first I heard of a cake made of ice cream was a couple of weeks ago at work...

My colleague asked if I had ever made 'Ice Cream Bread'. Like I'm sure you thought on reading this post, my reaction was something along the lines of 'what is that? If anything it sounds plain weird'. All he knew was that it involved stirring ice cream into flour, and then when it comes out of the oven it would supposedly miraculously turn into bread.

I had my doubts: no yeast, for starters, seemed to push a few holes in this theory.

I decided to consult facebook, and asked followers of Cake Of The Week's facebook page if they had ever heard of Ice Cream Bread, and if so, what on Earth was it?!

Luckily, Ellen from Bake It With Booze stepped in and found a link to this recipe for me. It turned out that Ice Cream Bread is actually a loaf cake, the same way as Banana Bread is cake. Now we were getting somewhere!

I read in a couple of places online that this recipe works best if you add stuff to enhance the ice cream flavour. Therefore (using a cups-to-metric converted version of the recipe Ellen gave me), to my Carte D'Or Salted Caramel Ice Cream I added chopped pecans and white chocolate. I also found that the batter was a bit dry after adding the flour so I added a couple of tablespoons of milk to moisten the cake up. This seems like a lot of hassle when you could just make a cake, but as you can see it did garner appetising results, so it's up to you whether it'd be worth it.

I'm bringing this into work tomorrow, but have had a sneaky taste and it is surprisingly flavoursome! I would definitely make this if I was in the mood for cake but found myself without many of the key ingredients.

Ingredients

• 500g Tub Salted Caramel Ice Cream
• 200g White Chocolate
• 100g Pecans
• 250g Plain Flour
• 1 Tsp Baking Powder
• 2 Tbsp Milk

Recipe

• Leave the ice cream out for a couple of hours so that it softens up to an almost-melted consistency (or cheat and use a microwave)
• Preheat the oven to 160C/140C fan and line a loaf tin with parchment paper.
• Chop the white chocolate and pecans.
• Tip the ice cream into a mixing bowl and stir in the pecans and white chocolate.
• Sift the flour and baking powder into the bowl and fold into the ice cream.
• Stir in the milk.
• Tranfer the batter to your loaf tin, then bake in the oven for 1hr 10 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean. Remember that the melted chocolate might make it look like your cake is still not cooked, so be careful!