Strawberries and Cream Gelato Cake

This recipe is Jon Snyder’s Strawberries and Cream Gelato Cake and is the cover feature for the June 2018 issue of Food and Wine Magazine. As soon as I took the magazine out of the mailbox and saw the cover, I just had to have it. The team at Food and Wine Magazine that comes up with these delectable-looking covers every month does a good job at suckering in people like me.

After browsing through the recipe, I knew this was going to be an epic amount of work. The recipe does say “…or favorite store-bought sorbet/gelato or ice cream” but on top of having an aversion to buying ready-made food products, what’s the point of an ice cream cake recipe if it’s just store-bought ice cream mushed together?!!

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As expected, this was a lot of work. Between making the batter, churning it in the ice cream maker, cleaning the bowl, refreezing the bowl (each sorbet/gelato was divided in half and churned, so all together six times), then making a layer, freezing, adding a layer, freezing etc., it basically took me a week to make this. If I were to do this again I would make the strawberry gelato and sorbet at half the recipe and the sour cream gelato the same.

The strawberry sorbet was packed with strawberry flavor. I bet there is a good reason the strawberries are mashed instead of blended or chopped. This surprisingly was my very first time making sorbet and I was shocked at how easy it was. It churned well and froze well with just two ingredients: strawberries and sugar. Unfortunately I didn’t have a potato masher so I used a meat pounder instead. The meat pounder works well for what it’s intended to do but since it’s solid and doesn’t have the grated design of a potato masher the strawberries kept slipping out. In hindsight I should have just used a fork…

The strawberry gelato was a little more icy than I had hoped but the texture of the sour cream gelato was nice and fluffy! The sour cream gelato by itself tasted very plain but with the strawberry it made a great contrast, almost like a mild version of cream cheese frosting.

Despite the magnitude of the full recipe, I was happy with the results and it is an impressive cake to show off at a gathering.