Homemade ice cream cake--and celebrations galore

We've been celebrating a lot over here recently.

 Someone turned 3 this past week...

and she couldn't have been happier about it.

"I waited long long time" she kept telling me on her actual birthday. And she was right. She had to wait through Carter's birthday and Oliver's birthday (a few weeks before hers) --which is really like an eternity to a little kid. But she made it. That special day finally arrived, and she was thrilled.

So we celebrated that morning with chocolate chip pancakes with Reeses Pieces on top--because, well...it was a special day. And special days call for candy on your pancakes.

And her cake that evening? Well, it was delish.

And soooo easy to make.

It's brownie ice cream cake people--seriously...you'll die.

The recipe is posted at the end of the post. Three easy steps and you've got a fantastic ice cream cake. Who needs Dairy Queen anymore??

And more celebrating happened yesterday when, after delaying it for as long as I possibly could, we finally carved our pumpkins.

And I pretended to love every minute of it.

Gooey cold hands and all.

Because they loved it. So that's all that really mattered.

Mya wanted to make a baby pumpkin.

A crying baby pumpkin, to be specific.

"Because babies cry, mommy. They cry." she told me.

And a celebration of another kind happened this week too--as our family came together to celebrate the life of our grandma. Family flew in all the way from England, cousins and aunts and uncles came together, and our Toronto family graciously welcomed the craziness that is our life with a newborn, 1yr old, 2yr old and 3yr old into their home. Thank you Auntie Gin and Uncle Geoff for hosting all of us!

...and these pics below just make me laugh.

Because this is our reality.

All we wanted was one nice little picture of all of us cousins, finally all together again.

But instead we got chaos, tears, wiggling bodies and one adorable little 4week old with a purple stained mouth...(thanks to nursing on messy purple medication to cure her thrush).

To me though, these kind of real-life photographs are even better than the perfectly posed ones. It will remind me one day of our reality with all of these little ones in our family--and it will I'm sure make me laugh all over again.

Happy Halloween everyone!! Hope your night was great.

***
...oh..and that ice cream cake recipe. Here it is. Three easy steps..here you go:

1) Get yourself a spring-formed pan and bake up some brownies in it (use a mix people--this is supposed to be easy!)  **make sure that you spray your pan really really well!!

2) Get some ice cream packed with chocolate bars (whatever kind you prefer) and put it over top of your baked brownies (use a spoon to smoosh it down to form to the pan evenly)  *I also drizzled some caramel sauce over the brownies before putting the ice cream on top--but do whatever you'd like.

It should look like this.

3) Drizzle chocolate sauce on top of the ice cream and crumple chocolate bars of your choice on top of that.

Put in the freezer for a few hours until the ice cream is completely hard again, then remove the sides of the pan and voila!!! Super easy and super delicious ice cream cake.

Enjoy!!

Erica xo