The last time I was offers cake/ice cream was at a St Patrick’s Day megaparty. I put a chunk of cake and a spoon of ice-cream into a pint of Guinness and had a float. It was awesome.
I thought about that, decided against it since it didn’t involve flavors of ice cream or recipes for cake. 
If it’s good cake, probably cake, but most birthday cakes aren’t good. That said, my feeling is, why choose?
Ice cream all the way. I’ll grudgingly eat cake without ice cream, but I’ll gladly eat ice cream without cake.
But it’s a tricky question, as cakes vary wildly in goodness. I love butter cream frosting but loathe marshmallow frosting. I like yellow cake but am lukewarm at best to chocolate.
I loathe ordinary cake. I loathe the box cakes baked in a cruddy 9x13 pan almost as much as the disgusting half-sheet crisco-frosted things from the grocery store. (It’s OK if you’re, say, 10, and want frosting roses on it, but I gag just looking at it.) The thing is, there are beautiful and delicious cakes right in the same case - strawberry and whipped cream, carrot cake, red velvet cake, beautiful confections! but expensive, and maybe that’s why the fallback is the same old thing - something big n’ bland to fill up all those mouths. I’ll take a tiny piece just to be polite but I put a napkin over it and stuff it in the trash when no one is looking… The ice cream is OK, anyone can swallow a scoop of choklit or vaniller ice cream.
Cake stinks, I have a birthday pies on my birthdays. With ice cream, of course.
Cake! I’ve got sensitive teeth. Ice cream bothers my teeth. I’ve grown to not be all that fond of ice cream.
Plus, cake is awesome!
If it’s that typical birthday cake that to me has no real flavor beyond ‘sweet’, it will be ice cream every time. In fact, off the top of my head, I van only think of a couple cakes that would beat ice cream-German chocolate, chocolate covered cherry cake, or carrot cake.
Cake. Ice cream is the kind of thing I only eat a couple of times a year. I don’t really care for it that much unless I’m really in the mood.
I love to bake cakes. I’ll take the cake every time. Especially if I’m the one who made it. 
The fact that I’m lactose intolerant probably figures into my answer as well. Ice cream is almost never worth it. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Definitely ice cream, unless it’s vanilla frosting. I have [del]a love[/del] an addiction to vanilla frosting that is so strong I’ve been known to eat it off of other people’s plates if they discard them.
Bingo was his name-o
Oysters or snails?
Unless it’s a special cake as opposed to a run-of-the-mill layer cake, I’ll go for ice cream every time. I loves me some ice cream!
Ice cream. I have finicky taste in cake (pie > cake!). Most commercial frosting tastes like crap. But almost any ice cream can taste good. Especially green tea ice cream, yay!
I love cake, and I love ice cream, but at a birthday party, I only want cake*. I don’t care much for ice cream on anything - it melts and does strange things to my dessert.
I don’t like ice cream cakes at all. There, I said it, and I stand by it.
*And no damned yellow cake, either - I don’t get to waste calories on cake every day, so it had better be chocolate!
If it’s an actual, honest-to-god “good” cake, I will choose the cake. Otherwise, I prefer ice cream.
Approximately 95% of the cakes I have been served at birthday parties are not good.
Ice cream, no question.
Well, welcome back.
Really? This was a fun thread. 