An ice cream cake can be a little bit daunting to make yourself, but you know what’s not daunting in the slightest? This Ice Cream Sandwich Cake. See, in a genius shortcut move it uses ice cream sandwiches as its base, so you still end up with a cake that’s celebratory but it also happens to be one that only took you about ten minutes to assemble. I don’t know about you, but ten minutes of work to get to a creamy, dreamy, chocolatey, ice cream layered confection sounds pretty good to me. Here’s how you go about it:

This will serve around nine if you’re being very generous with your portions but more like twelve if you’re doling out more reasonable sizes at something like a birthday party. You do need twenty-four ice cream sandwiches, which, yes, is a lot but this is a mighty fine place to turn to the store brand option. You don’t need anything fancy here — it’s all about the layering of ice cream and soft chocolate cake and whipped cream and fudge and caramel sauce…. Need I say more?

I guess I do, because I need to tell you how to make this, but that shouldn’t take long as it’s impossibly simple. Here goes:

You want to layer twelve of those ice cream sandwiches in a casserole dish. Let them sit and soften a bit and then smoosh them down a bit with the back of a spoon. Top them with some thawed whipped topping and then some hot fudge topping and caramel topping. If the sauces don’t drizzle easily, you can heat them up a bit first for pourability.

Then, you layer again. More ice cream sandwiches, more whipped topping, more fudge, and more caramel. One more layer of whipped topping and a final flourish of chopped peanuts and magic shell topping and your work is done. Pop the whole thing in the freezer until it’s solid enough to serve and you’ve got a dessert that’s fit for any celebration. That celebration can be as simple as, say, a nice warm day, because you’ll be looking for plenty of excuses to make this cake.