Leprechaun Cake -- St. Patty's Day Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake

This ice cream cake was a huge hit at our "Leprechaun Party", and early St. Patty's day celebration last weekend.

Not only was it super easy to make, but it was relative low-calorie (for an ice cream cake) and most importantly: de-lish!

Here's the how and the what:

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream
Chocolate Cookies
Multi-grain Waffles
Dark Chocolate Chips
Milk
Green Sprinkles


Line a 9 x 5 x 3 bread pan with saran wrap, and take a tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream out of the freezer to soften. I used Edy's slow churned version which has 1/2 the calories of regular ice cream, without artificial sweeteners.

Now take melt 2 cups of Hershey's Special Dark chips with a 1/4 cup of milk over low heat in a sauce pan to make a ganache. Remove from heat.

Crush up 4 chocolate famous amos wafers cookies (or any cookies you think would be good). Rolling pins and mortar/pestles both work well for this.

Now for the fun part:

Pour 1/3 of the ganache into the pan.
Spread 1/2 the ice cream on top.
Sprinkle in half the cookies.
Lay in two waffles.
Pour in another 1/3 of the ganache
Spread the rest of the ice cream.
Sprinkle in the rest of the cookies.
Lay in two waffles.
Pour in the last 1/3 of the ganache

Fold over the saran wrap to enclose the cake, press gently to ensure there are no air pockets in the cake, and freeze overnight. Remove from freezer 10 minutes before serving. Unwrap, cover with green sprinkles, slice and serve.

YUM!

Note about the waffles: You can use any regular cake or lady fingers or cookies instead, of course. Waffles just happened to be all that was on hand, and I was doubtful about using them but they were actually really great with the cake....