My forever brownie recipe, meringue failure, and learning to cook from YouTube

The story of ice cream cake

My husband and I started watching cooking videos from the Epicurious YouTube channel a few years ago (shoutout to

Emily Duncan

, one of our favourite home cooks on the channel), and over the winter break, the kids spotted some links to their videos on the ‘suggested for you’ bit when we were looking at something else. They wanted to watch. We watched the 4 Levels of Ice Cream Cake video in which three cooks of different abilities each make their version of an ice cream cake. The Level 1 chef (amateur) made an ice cream cake using a boxed cake mix, store-bought ice cream, and Cool Whip. The Level 2 chef (home cook), made a brownie base and used fancier store-bought ice cream for his version. And the Level 3 chef (professional), made an ice cream with layers of home-made ice cream (three different flavours), baked almond meringue, and a vanilla cookie base. 

It wasn’t enough to watch the video. Oh, no. The kids wanted me to make the ice cream cake. And they didn’t want me to make the one that used a boxed cake mix and store-bought ice cream. No, they wanted me to make the ice cream cake that the Level 3 chef made.

I’d like to point out here that the Level 3 chef is Chef Jürgen David, the Director of Pastry Research and Development at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) and he has been a professional pastry chef for 34 years. 

I would also like to point out that I only started baking regularly in the past year, and only started making my own ice cream six months ago. I had never made meringue. 

But the great thing about young children is that they seem to not understand the limitations of their parents; when you’re little your mum and dad can do anything. Experience, skill, knowledge? Psh. We want the beautiful-est ice cream cake shown in this video so Mummy, pleeeeease make it. 

I tentatively agreed. I had found the recipe on ICE’s blog, and it seemed like it was possible, even for mere mortals who hadn’t been professional pastry chefs for 34 years. I’d also watched the video a few times and he made it look so easy! 

Here’s a secret to people who make things look easy: it’s probably because they spent years learning the skill and honing the craft. Competent people at anything make it look easy. That doesn’t mean it will be easy for a complete novice, even with instructions.

When the day came to make the ice cream cake, I had changed the plan slightly. I wasn’t going to attempt a faithful recreation of Chef Jürgen’s ice cream cake; I was instead going to borrow elements from all three chefs, and a component from a completely different Epicurious video and chef. I was going to use a rectangular glass dish, like the Level 1 chef. I was going to use a brownie base, like the Level 2 chef. And I was going to use home-made ice cream and make the almond meringue, like the Level 3 chef. I wasn’t going to make three flavours of ice cream because frankly, I couldn’t be arsed. I used vanilla ice cream that we had made the week before.

Brownie base / my forever brownie

The reason we had even made vanilla ice cream the week before was because of another Epicurious video we had watched: The Best Brownies You’ll Ever Make, a tutorial by Chef Frank Proto. Before these brownies, I didn’t really love them. As a category, they’re fine. Evolutionarily speaking, It’s hard to dislike things that are filled with fat and sugar. But I had never eaten a brownie that I thought changed my life, or was the best brownie ever that eclipsed all of my other favourite desserts. We made ice cream to go with the brownie because historically speaking, most brownies tended to be a bit dry and are better eaten with ice cream.

Then we watched this video. Chef Frank promised that these were the best brownies ever, gooey and chocolatey and delectable. He talked about using the best ingredients you can afford (a lesson I have been learning again and again over the past three or four years), and he explained the method and techniques. I think, for me, the most important part of the video was the bake time, and learning when the brownies should come out of the oven — when it jiggles, and when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out dirty (but not liquidy). If the toothpick is clean, they’re over done.

So I made these brownies using Frank’s method and recipe. I used King Arthur’s double dark cocoa blend cocoa powder, King Arthur flour, King Arthur vanilla, Valrhona dark chocolate, Vital Farms eggs, and Vital Farms unsalted butter. I followed Frank’s instructions about sifting the dry ingredients, not overmixing when it came time to mix the wet and dry ingredients, and taking them out of the oven when they still jiggled.

They were the best goddamn brownies I had ever eaten in my life.

I trimmed off the edges so that I had a base that would fit the bottom of the baking dish. Remember, this wasn’t making brownies for the sake of making brownies, this was the bottom layer of the ice cream cake. We ate the edges, I had the ice cream cake base ready, and then I proceeded to the other ice cream cake layer I was going to attempt: the almond meringue from Chef Jürgen’s ice cream cake.

Almond meringue / almond dacquoise / stiff peaks eluded me

If the brownies were a resounding success, the almond meringue was pretty much the complete opposite. A quick background note: I have beaten egg whites to stiff peaks before, but I had never made meringue, which requires stiff peaks from not only egg whites but egg whites and sugar. 

I had old egg whites in the fridge from when we made the custard-base vanilla ice cream, so I combined those with sugar and started beating. And beating. And nothing happened. I wondered if old egg whites don’t get stiff. I was trying to look up an answer on my phone with one hand as I continued holding the electric beater with the other hand but couldn’t find a conclusive answer. 

I gave up that batch and got out new eggs, and separated out the new egg whites. Dumped them in with more sugar and tried again. Still nothing. Then I re-watched the segment of the ice cream video with Chef Jürgen and saw that oh shit, he added the sugar gradually! That wasn’t mentioned in his recipe! But this time, I didn’t give up, and just kept beating (after texting a couple of other people and asking for advice on what to do — they said to turn the beaters on high and keep going). Eventually, they got to stiff-ish peaks. They seemed stiff enough. Maybe they could have been stiffer? 

I had made a little piping bag out of a ziplock bag and duct tape, and I tried to pipe a rectangle. Chef Jürgen definitely made piping look easy. I did not end up making a neat rectangle; I made a mess. I gave up on the piping bag and just spread the mixture over parchment paper with a spatula. I had traced the baking dish onto the parchment so I tried to fill in that shape.

Then came the baking. The recipe didn’t give a time, just ‘until lightly browned and almost dried’. I kept checking every ten minutes and pulled them out when I thought they looked about right (I think I pulled them out after about 40 minutes). The edges came off the parchment well enough, but it did not lift off in one neat piece. Most of the meringue stuck to the parchment (wtf? I thought the point of parchment paper was that things don’t stick to it!), so I ended up having to scrape most of it off. Not great for presentation.

So the almond meringue ended up tasting fine (pretty good, actually), but looked terrible. Thankfully, it was for a middle layer of an ice cream cake so presentation wasn’t quite as important. I used the chunks I chipped off to create a kind of meringue jigsaw in one of the middle layers of ice cream cake and called it good.

The ice cream cake

So this was it. After dinner that evening, the ice cream cake had been in the freezer long enough for it to become one cohesive cake. There was a brownie base. A layer of home-made vanilla ice cream. A layer of almond meringue. Another layer of ice cream. The final touch was a dusting of Graham cracker crumbs on the top. 

It was a mighty fine ice cream cake. Presentation-wise, it didn’t look quite as impressive as the Level 3 ice cream cake that the kids wanted me to make, but it was the best ice cream cake that any of us had eaten. Every component was delicious, and the combination of flavours was great. 10/10 would eat again.

The forever brownie recipe

I have made the brownies again since the day of the ice cream cake. One helpful YouTube commenter wrote down the ingredients and method in Frank’s brownie video, and as I followed it a second time, I also weighed everything and wrote down the weights of the ingredients (because weights and metric for the win). This recipe is what I followed when I made them a second time, and they were just as delicious as the first. This is the only brownie recipe I will ever need — my forever brownies. By the way, this is a brownie you don’t need to eat with ice cream. This is a brownie that stands on its own.

Adapted from Frank Proto’s video on Epicurious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Ewo5WuYuk

Ingredients

Dry

120g flour

66g dark cocoa powder

½ tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp espresso powder

Wet

150g white sugar

125g brown sugar

100g neutral oil (½ cup)

113g unsalted butter, melted (after melting the weight is 100g; start with 113g unmelted butter or one American stick)

2 tsp vanilla extract

4 eggs

Additional

154g dark chocolate, chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Grease a 9x13 metal pan and create a sling out of two pieces of parchment paper.

3. Sift dry ingredients into a large bowl; mix well.

4. Whisk wet ingredients in a separate bowl until well combined.

5. Pour wet ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients. Gently mix/fold so it’s combined without dry bits. Don’t overmix. 

6. Pour batter into the pan. Use a spatula to smooth it out a bit and get the batter to be an even layer.

7. Scatter chopped chocolate over the top.

8. Bake for 20 minutes. It should be jiggly when it comes out of the oven, and a toothpick inserted in the middle should come out dirty but not liquid-y.

9. Let cool, then use the parchment sling to remove from the pan.