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Uses of Melted Ice Cream and Sherbet

A guide to using melted ice cream and sherbet in cakes, cookies, and jelly desserts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Uses of Melted Ice Cream and Sherbet

Ingredients

Directions

Bake with melted ice cream

  1. Use melted ice cream instead of milk in your cake or cookie recipe.

  2. For each cup of melted ice cream, reduce butter by 1 tablespoon and sugar by ¼ cup.

  3. Follow your usual cake or cookie directions.

Make sherbet jelly

  1. To make melted sherbet into jelly, mix with desired fruit and nuts.

  2. Serve the jelly with whipped cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cream + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Butter + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ice cream
Replaces milk as the liquid, adding fat and sugar to the batter.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes and flavors the cake or cookie.
Sugar
Sweetens the bake and helps it brown.
Fruit
Adds flavor and natural sweetness to the sherbet jelly.
Nuts
Add crunchy texture to the sherbet jelly.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, creamy topping that contrasts with the jelly.

The step that matters

Reduce the butter and sugar when using melted ice cream. Ice cream already contains fat and sugar, so adding the full amounts of butter and sugar would make the batter too rich and sweet, which can change how the bake spreads and sets.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Filbertfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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