Dairy Queen Vs Cold Stone: Which Chain Has The Best Ice Cream Cake?

Ice cream cakes seem like a particularly nostalgic dessert. Chances are you had your first icy taste during a kid's birthday party, often paired with the adorable pointy hats and the less adorable sound of kazoos. Even as we've gotten older, the frozen treat has remained an American party favorite. While you can always grab a store-bought ice cream cake at Walmart, I like to leave my ice cream cakes to the professionals. 

By professionals, I mean ice cream purveyors like Cold Stone Creamery and Dairy Queen. These two stores have very different vibes. Dairy Queen is a classic fast food restaurant that revolutionized the soft serve ice cream business alongside McDonald's. Meanwhile, Cold Stone Creamery was founded with the mission to offer quality ice cream that was made in-house rather than scooped from pre-packaged vats. Though they take vastly different approaches to the ice cream business, both offer basic birthday ice cream cakes that look fairly similar and have comparative flavors. 

Still, plenty can separate two cakes beyond looks and flavor combinations. I set out to discover which of these two frozen treats offered the best bang for your buck in terms of quality and quantity. That meant every element received a scrupulous evaluation, from the ice cream to the cake to the whipped cream icing. Even the way these things melted got a review. Without further ado, here's how each ice cream cake handled the heat of my scrutiny. 

As both Dairy Queen and Cold Stone Creamery have multiple options for ice cream cakes, I tried to select two cakes with very comparable flavor profiles. Funnily enough, the chains both offered a birthday cake item that combined the classic combo of chocolate and vanilla plus a whipped cream topping. I ordered both cakes ahead of time online. The respective cake prices were separated by only a few dollars ($34 vs. $37), so it was a negligible factor. 

As these are essentially birthday cakes, presentation and looks matter, so I rated each one's appearance based on frosting, sprinkles, and any extra decorative accompaniment. For my taste test, I considered which cake had the better ice cream flavor and texture, as well as whether the solid mix-ins — be it crunchy chocolate pieces or actual chocolate cake — complemented the ice cream. I also had to consider not just the size of the cake, but its weight. Even if a cake was larger in diameter, that didn't necessarily mean it offered true mass. 

On top of appraising cost, size, flavor, texture, and appearance, I conducted a melt test. I left the cake slices out for 30 minutes at room temperature to see how quickly they melted and whether it was still relatively enjoyable to eat even when less than solid. Because let's be honest: If you serve this at a sunny backyard birthday party, chances are things will get a little liquid.

The Cold Stone Creamery Birthday Cake has three main features: two devil's food cake layers, two sweet cream ice cream layers, and a whipped white frosting overcoat. Oh, and loads of rainbow sprinkles. Though its diameter was only 6 inches, it was both denser and taller than the 8-inch Dairy Queen cake. So even with the 2-inch difference in cake area, I felt like you were getting roughly the same amount of cake.

Looks-wise, this was a simple but impressive stunner. Each layer was perfectly measured and yielded a clean, two-tone slice that landed neatly on the plate. The exterior was generously coated in rainbow sprinkles, making it feel effortlessly festive, and the sweet piped swirls on top added a touch of refinement. But looks will only get you so far. 

What this cake really delivered was traditional flavors executed with precision and flair. I've always been a fan of the chain's sweet cream ice cream; it's a rich, understated take on the plain vanilla flavor, and it shines when paired with the velvety devil's food cake. As an added bonus, the cake has a luxurious amount of whipped cream-like frosting, which I have a particular weakness for. As for the "melt test," the cake handled it like a champ. The cake helped insulate the ice cream, and the bit that did melt worked fairly nicely as a kind of crème anglaise sauce for the chocolate cake.   

The Dairy Queen traditional ice cream cake features two soft serve flavors (chocolate and vanilla) plus a central layer of fudge and crunch — a mysterious textural element that seems to be a blend of cookie crumbles mixed with chocolate cone coating. A scant bit of whipped cream-like frosting was piped as a top and bottom border ring, but the majority of this cake was the signature Dairy Queen soft serve. 

Externally, the DQ cake was pretty, marked by restrained sprinkle usage and a couple of cute but inedible ornaments like the red plastic happy birthday placard and balloon emblems. Once sliced, the interior revealed a slightly more clumsy appearance, with an uneven distribution of vanilla to chocolate soft serve. 

If you've ever had any type of Dairy Queen Blizzard, you probably have a good idea of what this tastes like. It does taste good, but in a juvenile way. It's on the icier side, and some of that classic airiness that makes soft serve so enjoyable is lost when compressed into cake layers. I wouldn't really consider the crunchy layer a proper cake entry, but it is a welcome addition of some toothsome texture. The melt test was a disaster. With no insulating cake and a frozen dairy base that has a ton of air whipped into it, the soft serve melted into puddles in mere minutes with the crunchy bits bobbing on the surface like so much litter.    

When you get down to it, only Cold Stone Creamery offers a true ice cream cake here. The Dairy Queen option is a glorified frozen parfait, with the middle layer of chocolate crunchies unequal to the tender texture of devil's food cake in the Cold Stone option. And even if you'd argue with me that the presence of actual cake shouldn't disqualify Dairy Queen from the running, it's a moot point. Stripping away the cake element, the Cold Stone dessert offered a more impressive appearance, a tastier whipped frosting, and — most importantly — the more delicious ice cream.  

An ice cream cake should live and die upon the quality of its namesake ingredient, and Cold Stone Creamery has a quality that just can't be matched by the soft serve-style that Dairy Queen offers. Let's not forget that Dairy Queen can't even legally call what it serves ice cream because it doesn't contain enough butterfat. That doesn't mean that the DQ option doesn't have its place at a birthday party. I think a lot of kids would like it, especially because it's like a mega-sized Blizzard complete with sprinkles and whipped cream frosting. But since I'm a kid no longer, nostalgia is really the only major selling point for this cake. If it were my birthday celebration, I'd be serving up the Cold Stone Creamery Ice Cream Cake to mark the stupendously sweet occasion.