Banana Fosters Melted Ice Cream Cake

The name of this cake is slightly deceiving because while you do use melted ice in the cake, the cake is not an ice cream cake. What it is, is a moist, decadent cake that can be customized and changed up to please any taste bud or preference. The cake is made with a boxed cake mix and then you add in a pint of your favorite ice cream. For this particular cake I used a golden butter cake mix and Haagen Dazs Bananas Foster. The combo was out of this world and everyone kept going back for seconds. I iced the cake with a simple confectioners sugar and milk glaze so as to not overpower the taste of the cake itself. It was such a hit and the best part is everyone thought the cake was made from scratch. The photo of this cake just doesn't do it justice, so you'll have to trust me when I tell you this cake is a total home run. I don't even remember where I saw this recipe originally, there are a lot of different versions of it online and they are all essentially the same recipe and everyone says it's delicious.

So next time you need to make a delicious cake keep this recipe in mind, the variations of the cake truly are endless. Next time I'm thinking cookies and cream ice cream and chocolate cake or maybe a Christmas version with egg nog ice cream and vanilla cake.

Gooey Red Velvet Butter Cookies for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap!

The tree is up, decorated and lit. Houses are decorated, Santa is in the mall and beautiful cards with warm wishes and adorable kiddies have started coming in the mail. Christmas season is upon us, which means the malls are packed and your credit card bill is probably through the roof, but it means something else too. It's baking season, which also means it's cookie swap time!

Still being fairly new to the world of blogging I have been amazed countless times at how involved food bloggers can truly become with one another. It's like our own little universe that you can't quote understand unless you're a part of it. That being said I participate in The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap for the first time ever, it really was a blast though I had the most difficult time deciding on which cookie I wanted to make and send out. Ultimately I decided to go with Red Velvet Gooey Cookies because 1. I just love anything red velvet and 2. they seemed to Christmasy to me. I thought the cookies came out amazing and my taste testers all agreed, so much so that I will likely be making them again soon.

Now technically these cookies are semi-homemade as you need to use cake mix for them. However, if you look up most gooey butter cake or cookie recipe you will see that this is the case. So I gave myself a pass on this one and am calling them homemade, you'll see when you make them. You'd never know you had any help from Duncan Hines with these bad boys, which was once again part of the Foodbuzz Tastemakers program. I hope my fellow cookie swappers loved them and I really look forward to doing the cookie swap again next year. Thank you again to Julie and Lindsay for setting this up. One more bit of exciting news is we made the papers! Check out the article about The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap here. Also if you're interested in participating in the cookie swap next year you can sign up to receive information here.