I recently had a request for an icecream cake like DQ sells for a baby shower. First of all, where do you start? Can it be made as a sculpted cake? (She wants the pregnant belly cake) and can you put fondant over top? Detailed instructions would be much appreciated Thanks!

Here's the recipe that I made for my DH last Father's Day it was delicious; but I put it in my springform pan. I'm thinking that for the belly shape, if you line your bowl with either wax paper or parchment, that just may work. You should be able to just lift it out of the bowl with the wax paper. I don't know how covering it with the fondant will work though...I've not done that before. hth!

Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cake
Ingredients
  1 gallon of vanilla Ice cream
1 package of Oreo cookies
1 jar of Hot Fudge sauce
1/2 gallon of chocolate Ice cream
1 small container of frozen cool whip(red container)
Instructions
Butter the cake pan of your choice(I use a springform pan), then press wax paper over the bottom of the pan. Spread a 1/2 gal. of vanilla ice cream softened in the bottom of the pan until the pan is half full. Sprinkle with crushed Oreo cookies, then spoon hot fudge sauce(room Temp.) over the top of this. Set in freezer until frozen. Remove from freezer and add 1/2 of gallon of chocolate(softened) over the top of the last layer till the pan is full. Return to freezer and freeze very hard. Remove from freezer. Take out of springform pan. **Frost with a mixture of equal parts of Ice cream and thawed cool whip beaten together. Decorate. Return to freezer until serving time.


**OR Frost with Whipped Cream or Whipped Topping (Cool whip). If you prefer whipped topping, look in your grocery store freezer case for a product called Rich Whip. It comes in little red & white cartons that look like whipping cream cartons. Whenever I need to use a topping product, I VERY MUCH prefer RICH WHIP. It is made by the people who make the frozen coffee creamer. This stuff will whip very stiff & thick & will spread well & pipe (decorations) excellently

I've made some "cakes" like Dairy Queen's ice cream cakes (snowman, ornament, & Twilight Eclipse cakes in my photos). Like Dairy Queen's, my version has no cake at all. I did add a thin brownie base which is different than Dairy Queens. I made mine one layer at a time in a spring form pan.

I suppose that you could carve it into a belly shape but it would be pretty difficult because with it being ice cream, for it to hold its shape it needs to be frozen which is not easy to cut. And for it to be soft enough to carve, it could be a gooey mess.

For your needs, you could use a large stainless steel bowl and build the cake from the top down instead of the bottom up. I wouldn't recommend covering it with fondant though because its gonna have to stay in the freezer while not working on it and the fondant will get so hard, it would be difficult to cut and not easy to eat. The fondant circle I added to my niece's Twilight Eclipse cake was a pain to cut and that wasn't covering the whole thing.

If this sounds like what you're looking for, I'd be happy to go into it further details.

Ive only made a few ice cream cakes so Im by no means an expert. My WMI had owned a bakery and they made ice cream cakes there so she did a little side lesson with us one day in class and she taught us how she made them in her shop. She baked two layers of cake. One of the pans she used to bake the cake in she lined with plastic wrap then filled it with ice cream and put it in the freezer. When the ice cream was rock hard she lifted that layer of ice cream out of the pan using the plastic wrap then sandwiched it between the two layers of cake then iced with buttercream. Of course she had a walk-in freezer she could stand in to do all of this so her ice cream never melted. If you dont have something like that youll have to work super fast in little stages and keep popping your cake back in the freezer so it can harden up again. Transporting will also be difficult. I dont know that you can sculpt ice cream cakes; its hard enough just to make a plain round one.