A food observance on June 27 celebrating ice cream cake, the frozen dessert that layers ice cream, cake or cookie crumbs, and topping into one.
Last updated March 18, 2026 · by the
Holiday Calendar Team
“June 27 was Johanna Jurado's birthday. Her daughter Jenna turned it into a national day months after Johanna died.
In 2018, Jenna Jurado of Wellington, Florida submitted June 27, her late mother Johanna's birthday, to National Day Calendar as National Ice Cream Cake Day. Johanna had received an ice cream cake on that day every year.
Ice cream cake is about as mainstream as American dessert gets. It sits on top of a multibillion-dollar frozen-treat industry, and a version of it has waited in a freezer case at every Carvel, Dairy Queen, and Baskin-Robbins for decades.
National Ice Cream Cake Day did not come from any of them. It came from a kitchen in Wellington, Florida, and a birthday that suddenly had no one to celebrate.
The strange thing about the day is the gap between its scale and its source. A treat sold by national chains now carries a date that meant everything to exactly one family. The rest of the country just gets to keep the cake.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Ice Cream Cake Day ran on June 27. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
The ice cream cake is older than any brand that sells it. Its ancestor is the frozen bombe, a Victorian dessert descended from the English trifle. Cooks layered sponge, custard, and fruit over ice cream, then froze the whole mold so the structure held when they turned it out.
The French refined the form into the bombe glacée, shaped to look like a cannonball. That is where the name comes from. For most of the 1800s it was the work of professional kitchens, not a thing you bought on a Tuesday.
What made it ordinary was an accident. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1934, Tom Carvel's ice cream truck got a flat tire in Hartsdale, New York. He parked in a pottery-store lot and sold the softening product before it spoiled, and it moved faster than the frozen kind.
Two years later he bought that store and opened a permanent stand. He spent the next decades pioneering ice cream franchising and the layered ice cream cake that chains still build on, guarding the format closely.
Others scaled what Carvel started. Baskin-Robbins opened in 1945 and made variety its whole pitch, eventually creating more than 1,400 flavors. Dairy Queen pushed the cake into birthdays and graduations. By 2011, Dairy Queen Canada could stage a 22,333-pound version in a Toronto square as pure spectacle.
Carvel kept the dessert weird and personal with character cakes like Fudgie the Whale. The freezer-case ice cream cake became a default object of American celebration, familiar enough that nobody asks where it came from.
The holiday's own origin is the least corporate part of the story. Johanna Jurado taught in Palm Beach County for about 25 years and got an ice cream cake every June 27, her birthday.
She died in a car accident on April 29, 2018, weeks before she would have turned 52. Her daughter Jenna submitted the date to National Day Calendar, which fields about 18,000 ideas a year and approves roughly 30. June 27 made the cut, and the cake became a country's.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The cake people buy when a day is supposed to matter.
The ice cream cake is the celebration flagship of a frozen-dessert business that runs through grocery freezers and chain storefronts nationwide. It is the version of ice cream people buy when a day is supposed to matter.
Carvel's whale and alien cakes have sold for nearly fifty years with almost no redesign. Few products mark American birthdays as reliably as a cake you cut while it is still frozen.
The day exists because one family wanted to keep a mother's birthday alive after she was gone. It hands that small, repeatable ritual, a cake on a set date, to anyone who wants it.
My mom was a master celebrator. She always made people feel loved, and even more so on birthdays.
It was emotional. I thought it was a beautiful tribute to Johanna.
GOOD TO KNOW
Carvel launched the whale in 1977 as a deliberately masculine gift, first sold with the inscription 'To a Whale of a Dad.'
The thin crunchy ribbon between the chocolate and vanilla in a Carvel cake is officially called 'Crunchies.'
Carvel's other icon, the alien-faced Cookie Puss, debuted in 1972 and was designed by corporate chef Andrew Bianchi.
When Tom Carvel founded his first permanent stand in 1936, he built it around a secret soft-serve formula, the recipe at the heart of the brand.
Carvel held more than 300 patents, trademarks, and copyrights and sold the company in 1989 for over $80 million.
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Test your knowledge
It is observed every year on June 27, the birthday of Johanna Jurado, the woman the day honors.
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