u/FuzzBuzzer

As promised! (This is one weekend I will never get back.)

Ok, to be fair, I can say a FEW positive things about this recipe. (Please don’t come at me, hatters! 😂 However, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, so y’all were right there.)

I scaled the recipe down and built it in a small rectangular ceramic dish, since I wasn't interested in producing a cake the size of a manhole cover. Instead of crumbling the muffins into the ice cream, I sliced them about 1.5 centimeters thick and laid them in as a proper cake layer between the two ice cream layers. This worked well for a small rectangular dish, and the muffins held up in the freezer because they were store bought. Since premade muffins are made with neutral oil rather than butter, I figured they would stay tender when frozen instead of turning into gravel. Anyone wasting good quality bakery muffins on this is a dolt. Not sure if anyone would, though.

I also drizzled the white chocolate shell vs. pouring a thick coating over the top, which made the whole thing easier to cut. The knife placed under hot water worked. Both of those tips, along with the parchment paper sling for getting the cake out of a non-springform pan, came from commenters on the blog recipe. I must give some credit where it's due. The comment section did better work than the recipe, both the good and the bad.

Cutting it with a warm knife still caused some breakage, but nothing catastrophic. Lifting it out of the dish with parchment was a bit fiddly but successful.

It gave me brain freeze. I ate a piece anyway. My husband, (who says hi!) will happily eat the rest.

Category	Score
Flavor	8 / 10
Ease	4 / 10
Practicality	2 / 10
Time efficiency	2 / 10

The flavor is genuinely good, but let's be honest about the degree of difficulty here. Vanilla ice cream, blueberry muffins, white chocolate, and a graham cracker and gingersnap crust. You would have to work hard to make that taste bad. The crust and the white chocolate were my favorite parts, and neither of them is doing anything clever.

My biggest complaint is the impracticality. None of the individual steps are hard, but there are a lot of them, you're racing melting ice cream the entire time, and the freezing schedule turns this into a weekend project. Or at least a day. Freeze, decorate, freeze again. All of that to arrive somewhere you could have reached in ninety seconds with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a blueberry muffin on the side.

So: it works. It’s not horrible, but it’s not genius either. It's also not something I'll ever make again on a random day, for a baby shower, or even for kids. They would like it, I’m guessing, but would not have the attention span to stay interested up until serving time.

Fun once for a recon mission, can be pretty if you have the patience for it, and a perfectly decent flavor combination...that did not need to become a whole ass ice-cream cake recipe. However, if there’s one thing HBH uhl-oooooves to do, it’s take a simple concept and turn it into something bizarre and corky.

I see now that my drizzle top looks like uncooked Ramen. I had no way of knowing this would happen. I’m not Google. 😉

 ETA: I added that dead flower garnish JUST for you guys.