How to Make Ice Cream Bread, But Better

The Internet's crazy about a cake-like bread made with melted ice cream. So we put it through the Epi Test Kitchen and made it even better.

Ice cream bread is a seemingly-simple, two-ingredient recipe that I discovered by going down the dark hole of the Internet, where I found it nestled among three-ingredient cheesecakes, banana-egg pancakes, and cookie-stuffed cookies. Much like dump cake, ice cream bread seems to have risen to popularity thanks to the promise of ease: you simply mix melted vanilla ice cream and self-rising flour, pour it into a pan, and bake.

In theory, it should work. Vanilla ice cream contains eggs and sugar, and self-rising flour includes all-purpose flour, salt, and baking powder, which gives you a recipe for a very basic quick bread. And when I made the first batch, it did, in fact, work. But the resulting bread was flat, dense, and flavorless.

I wanted to make it better. But I also wanted to keep the spirit of the recipe in tact—it had to be easy, and, naturally, it had to involve ice cream. So I brought the recipe for ice cream bread into the Epi Test Kitchen, where it was tested, and tested, and—finally—improved.

TEST ONE: FLAVOR SWAP

First, I swapped out the plain vanilla ice cream (classic, but boring) for flavor-packed butter pecan ice cream, which added notes of caramel as well as crunch from the pecans. Those flavors got me thinking of banana bread, and the more I thought about it, the more bananas made sense: they would add moisture and sweetness that the ice cream bread desperately needed. But when I made a batch of the bread with four mashed bananas (the same amount used in Our Favorite Banana Bread), the result was way too wet and gooey.

TEST TWO: ADJUST THE BANANA

Four bananas didn't work, so for round two I tried out just two bananas. That loaf was much too dry. Feeling like I had come down with a serious case of Goldilocks syndrome, I finally settled on three bananas.

TEST THREE: FIGURE OUT THE FLOUR

I had a moist banana bread now, but I still felt the texture could be better. So I started adjusting the amount of flour in the recipe. Three more loaves went into the oven: one with 1 cup of flour, one with 1 1/4 cups of flour, and one with 1 1/2 cups of flour. Texturally, the loaf with 1 1/2 cups of flour was the best, with a a pretty doomed top and a tender crumb. But the loaf with 1 1/4 cups of flour tasted better—that extra 1/4 cup of flour in the other loaf absorbed too much of the banana's sweetness. Which meant it was time to think about sugar.

TEST FOUR: ADD A LITTLE SUGAR

You'd think that three bananas would provide a good punch of sweetness, but no matter how ripe the bananas were, the bread lacked the level of sweetness that something called ice cream bread should have. So in went a 1/4 cup sugar, and voila! Ice cream bread—albeit with a couple more ingredients—that the Internet's going to want to make again.     

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