Frozen Brownie Sundaes

I'm not ashamed to admit that a majority of the recipes I try come from one or two chefs on the Food Network.  This one is no different, it's Giada De Laurentiis' recipe for Frozen Brownie Sundaes.  I don't normally like recipes that waste food as part of their process (this one has you use only part of a brownie mix) but I was so intrigued by the recipe that I made an exception.  Although the recipe takes awhile to make, it was well worth the wait.

Here is the brownie layer before cooking:

And after cooking:

For some reason, I forgot to take a picture of the ice cream layer.  Since I was worried that the ice cream might melt too much if I didn't watch it, I ended up "softening" the ice cream in the microwave.  15 seconds in the microwave softened the frozen ice cream enough so that it was still frozen but easily spreadable.

After the ice cream layer re-froze overnight, it was time to make the chocolate layer.  Although the recipe tells you to heat the cream in a pan and then add in the chocolate, I've never had much luck with heating the cream to the right temperature without burning it.  So, I just used the double boiler method and it came out fine:

One other point on the chocolate layer - I made the chocolate layer as the recipe directed but found that it made for too thick of a layer on top of the ice cream than I would have preferred.  Next time, I'll cut the chocolate layer recipe in half so that it's more to my liking.

Back into the freezer for an hour or so and it was ready to eat (thankfully, I was losing patience).  I didn't have frozen strawberries on hand but my roommate had some fresh strawberries so I improvised and came up with a pretty good strawberry sauce.  Here's the final product:

This dessert was tasty and, all things considered, not too hard to make.  I probably won't make it all the time but it'll go into my repertoire for when I need to really impress.