Chocolate cherry amaretto ice cream cake

Oh. My. God. This is one of the best desserts I’ve ever eaten!

Let’s rewind. After having tons of fun with Heathy’s Moon Pie challenge, I was totally jazzed to enter her latest raw dessert contest: the Ultimate Raw Ice Cream Cake challenge. I knew pretty much from the start that I wanted to combined the delicious flavours of cherries and amaretto, and to round it off, I decided to throw in some chocolate. I’ve always been a big fan of amaretto liquer (although I rarely drink alcohol anymore), and I’ve been having tons of fun with a bottle of almond extract I picked up a few weeks ago. It really does a great job of imparting the delicious flavour of amaretto to certain foods. I’ve been adding a few drops of it to vegan yogurt recently, along with frozen cherries, so I knew the flavour combination would work well in my ice cream cake. Here’s the breakdown of my take on a raw ice cream cake:

Crust: almond dark cacao (almonds, cacao, coconut oil, maple sugar)

Layer 1: chocolate ice cream (Heathy’s recipe)

Layer 2: amaretti cookie crumble (almonds, shredded coconut, coconut oil, maple sugar, almond extract)

Layer 3: cherry amaretto ice cream (Heathy’s recipe, + almond extract, cherries)

Swirl: chocolate ice cream and cherry amaretto ice cream (with cherry juice for the pink colour)

Toppings: coconut whipped cream (Heathy’s recipe + some fresh young coconut), dried cherries, amaretti cookie

And that’s all, folks! The only challenge I ran into while constructing this beauty was an absent icing set. At one point I did own an icing bag complete with all kinds of deocrative tips for making fun icing patterns, but I can’t find it anywhere! Maybe it was lost when we moved last summer? At any rate, I improvised by cutting a hole in the corner of a ziploc bag, poking the tip of an old agave squirt bottle in the corner, and using that contraption to ice the top. It wasn’t ideal, but hey, it worked in a pinch!

I used frozen sour cherries (although I still found them pretty sweet), and the slight tartness perfectly counterbalanced the sweetness of the remaining components of the ice cream cake. It was a total joy every time I bit into one of the juice cherry chunks. As far as the individual components go, I think my favourite part to eat on its own was probably the amaretti cookie crumble. I had to stop myself from devouring it so I would have enough left for the cake.

My boy and I each had a slice last night (it may or may have not been my entire dinner!) and we’re still swooning. It also totally gave me a sugar high… I’ve been eating ultra clean lately so even sugar in raw desserts get to me super easily these days. Thankfully, it wasn’t difficult to enlist the help of a small army of friends, who are eager to assist in polishing off the rest of this delicious creation. In the meantime, here’s some raw food porn for your enjoyment If you want even more pics, check out some of the other entries floating around the blogosphere, like Kelli’s rawspberies and cream & chocolate strawberries & banana cakes, Norka’s lilac and poppy seed cake, Gillian’s Gimme S’More cake, an amazing orange blossom cake, several creations by Nelly, and Bitt’s cookies ‘n’ cream cake.