Texas Sheet Cake

I was looking through some of my cookbooks for some sort of dessert to make and came across a recipe for a Texas Sheet Cake in two different books. That sounded really good, but the freezer was empty and the combination of chocolate cake, chocolate icing that turns fudgy, and pecans sounded like one that could not be beat.

Rating: 5 scoops

This ice cream was absolutely delicious. The combination of chocolate cake base, fudge ripple, and butter pecans were a great combination and one that I wanted more scoops of and was reminiscent of a good Texas Sheet Cake. I've discovered that I really like making and eating ice creams that are built off other flavors, even though they're typically more work given all the different components that go into making them - and this one was no exception.

What is a Texas Sheet Cake? It's typically a thin chocolate cake cooked in a sheet pan with a chocolate icing poured over top of the hot cake to form a fudgy layer and finally topped with pecans. The history of this cake is unclear - some sources say similar recipes were first published in other states - and reasons abound for what makes a Texas Sheet Cake "Texas". Texas Monthly's recipe includes various reasons why Texas may have adopted it as theirs: the large size, the Texas ingredients, or the richness that one expects of some Texas food.

To get started with this ice cream, I made a chocolate cake base following a similar style as my doughnut and carrot cake ice creams. The baked goods are blended into the hot base, which helps the base not only take on the flavor of the baked good but also thickens up the base. Luckily, I had a slice of chocolate cake in the freezer from a cake we made for Valentine's Day a few weeks ago, so I pulled that out and carved out just the cake.

From there, the ice cream was made, chocolate cake added, blended, and cooled. I wasn't sure if the ice cream was going to pick up enough brown coloring from the cake and had some cocoa powder ready to darken it, but it wasn't needed given the nice hue of brown the cake contributed.

The fudge ripple was one that I have made many times before. Given how important the fudge-like layer is to Texas Sheet Cake, I knew I was going to go heavy on the fudge in the final ice cream!

Finally, the buttered pecans were very simple: mixing some pecans and chunks of butter in a pan and cooking in the oven for a few minutes created nicely coated pecans that I then added to the ice cream in the last minute or so of churning to fully incorporate them into the base.