Sandra Lee Semi Homemade Cooking

Baked Potato Ice Cream: The 5 Worst Desserts Ever Made on 'Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee'

Oct 19, 2017 at 4:00pm

Baked Potato Ice Cream: The 5 Worst Desserts Ever Made on 'Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee'

Photos: Food Network ; Illustration: Cody Schmitz

Sandra Lee, the host of the long-running Food Network series Semi-Homemade Cooking, has made some delightfully terrible dishes over the years. But, out of everything Sandra has "cooked" in the last 14 years, her desserts take the crown as the most egregious of kitchen crimes. (I use "cooked" in quotes because not one recipe on this list involves Sandra actually cooking anything. Seriously, not one.)

For casual viewers, Sandra appears as the fever dream of every QVC / Food Network mom from the early 2000s. She decorates pre-made cookies, wears wild Halloween costumes, and overuses the words "delicious," "perfect," and "cocktail." It's relatable! Don't overthink it.

I learned two important things in my research for this piece: Sandra Lee makes the strongest cocktails on earth, and she is a wonderful person. She was recently appointed as a UNICEF emissary to combat global hunger and malnutrition, and she's a breast cancer survivor who uses her platform to raise funds for research. Oh! And she's the first lady of New York. It turns out the real reason Sandra doesn't have time to bake a cake is because she's waist deep in public service.

Sandra Lee is a woman of many talents, but I would be lying if I said one of those talents was making dessert. This woman assembles some of the most God-awful sugary concoctions I have ever seen. All Semi-Homemade recipes rely on store-bought items over any actual cooking, but these five dessert disasters take this concept to an unbelievable extreme and then cover the result in canned icing and acorns. Let's take a look.

Heirloom Noel Cake

"Not everything lines up, which is exactly how it is on a normal Christmas tree."

Ah, yes. We start with the mint green tower of broken Christmas dreams. For this recipe, Sandra begins by finding seven pre-baked cake rounds in different sizes from her local grocery store. So, good luck with that, I guess. Then she assembles The Monster.

It's four cans of icing, countless decorative gel sprays, and a bunch of yellow birthday candles. For Christmas!

Hey, Sandra, step away from the icing. I just want to talk. Mainly about the scale of your dessert. This cake is HUGE. It's simply too big for any holiday function. I think it could feed hundreds with the amount of icing alone. Also, there's an ice cream cone on top of it?

So, Merry Christmas, family. I got you a wilting mound of inedible sugar decor. And that's just the first dessert.

Chai Ice Cream in Caramel Cups

"This is the funnest recipe you're ever going to see."

This is the most advanced recipe on the list, so prepare yourselves. There's still no baking. But! Not only must you place three (3) store bought caramels on a baking sheet, but you also have to make tea.

My favorite part of the recipe? When Sandra melts ice cream, pours a cup of tea into it and then puts this mixture back into the carton to re-freeze it (let's think about that texture for a moment), she realizes that there's a lot of liquified ice cream left in the bowl. "And a little left for me to munch on!" she screams, delighted, not realizing that one can not possibly "munch" on liquid cream.

When you see the final product, I want you to picture yourself eating it. Write in and tell me: How would you eat this thing? Do you bite down on it, teeth first into frozen cream? Do you cut it with a knife and fork? I guess just spoon out the ice cream. But then how hard will the cold caramel bowl be? I have questions, and Sandra Lee does not give easy answers.

No Bake Love Cake

"Sometimes repeating a pattern gives you that geometry."

This is billed as a wedding cake, I think. Or the cake you throw together when you need to hastily renew your vows, according to Sandra's put-upon sous-chef. I just want you to keep that in mind: That this could be the centerpiece that is wheeled out on somebody's big day.

It doesn't look quite as bad as the noel cake, but that's only because everything is pre-bought. The sheet cake tiers are already baked and frosted. Even the sugar cookies were ordered online.

So that's why it's called a no-bake cake? I'm sorry, but if you buy yourself a chocolate chip cookie, you do not get to call it a "no-bake cookie". It was still baked, even if you didn't bake it.

The "recipe" is literally only assembly. A whisk never enters a bowl. An egg is never cracked. So one has to wonder why Sandra does such a bad job with it. If you're going to buy all the individual pieces for a wedding cake, please just buy an assembled wedding cake. You really don't have to put together your wedding cake like a pile of legos.

Kwanzaa Cake

"Here's a trick. I use pie filling."

Nothing in this cake pertains to any Kwanzaa tradition, except for the candles on top. Let's just say that first. In the same episode, Sandra fills a "Hanukkah Cake" with marshmallows, never mentioning if she bothered to find the kosher version of the gelatin treat. So Sandra isn't exactly going for cultural accuracy here.

Despite these missteps, the cake itself is simply a tornado of the worst flavor combinations on earth. She splits an angel food cake and covers it with cocoa/cinnamon icing. She fills the middle of the cake with CANNED APPLE PIE FILLING. And then she sprinkles the cake with pumpkin seeds and "acorns," which are CLEARLY just corn nuts. I'm shaking. Somebody stop her.

Baked Potato Ice Cream

"If you've ever wondered what to do with the top of your butter dish,"

We've arrived at Sandra's holy potato grail. It's the one that started it all. This dessert sent me into a tail spin. I couldn't sleep. For days, I couldn't think about anything but THE POTATO. It became my life's purpose, to tell everyone I knew about The Potato. "Have you seen the ice cream baked potato?" I asked everyone, with bloodshot eyes. Every step of this recipe is so next-level bonkers that it's hard to keep up. Let's go through the steps.

She uses a serrated knife to cut the container off a pint of ice cream. It sounds like nails on a chalkboard.
She wraps the exposed ice cream log in plastic and squishes it "into the shape of a potato."
She makes a "little ravine."
The lump goes into the freezer, "because it needs to stay nice and cold and hard."
An entire can of lemon icing goes into the butter dish. "I was trying to think of what would give me the shape of butter, and I looked at this and thought, Mmhmm. That's it." You know what would give you the shape of butter, Sandra? A square. Just make it into a little square, for the love of God. Don't freeze a brick of icing.
She dusts her serving platter with at least a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder, then covers the potato with more powder, then uses her hands to SCRAPE MOUNDS OF CHOCOLATE POWDER AGAINST THE FROZEN ICE CREAM LOG SOMEBODY PLEASE STOP HER!
Whipped topping becomes sour cream, and the log of butter is finally cut into a "square" and placed on top.
Pistachios are dyed green (even though they are already green to begin with) and sprinkled atop the lump.

And that's it. She leaves us with that. No apologies. No answers. No ceremonious bite of The Potato. She brings this concentrated evil into the world and then goes silent, telling us only that it can feed 2-3 people (A grave underestimation).

I am only left with one question: WHO IS THE POTATO FOR? She just made ice cream less fun! Is it for the kids? For a date night? I can't imagine one person who might request this dish. I think it will haunt me forever. What else does Sandra Lee have the potential to bring into the world?

Watch Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee on the Food Network