Mardi Gras is coming up this Tuesday, so our treat this week is in honour of New Orleans: a pralines and cream ice cream cake. You can see by my picture that I took this in a different direction, so let me first explain what this recipe is supposed to look like.

The recipe as written consists of four homemade components:

• Classic Pralines
• Sweet & Salty Caramel Sauce
• Brown Sugar Praline Ice Cream
• Graham Crumble

The pralines and caramel sauce are swirled into the ice cream, which is then spread into a springform pan in layers with graham crumble in between.

Because I had no need for a 9″ ice cream cake calling my name from the freezer every day until I ate the whole thing, I cheated a bit in order to scale this recipe down. Instead of making the ice cream, I bought a small carton of Dulce de Leche Häagen-Dazs, which is caramel ice cream that already has a dulce de leche swirl in it. I made a half recipe of the pralines and the graham crumble. Once the ice cream softened a bit sitting at room temperature, I just layered the three components up in my sundae glass until it was full.

The pralines are SUPER sweet, and I think would be nice stirred into vanilla bean ice cream for contrast, because with the dulce de leche ice cream, it was a bit of overkill. I loved the graham layers though, it reminded me of this ice cream dream from a few years ago.

You can find the recipe here!

More Baked Sunday Mornings here!