Ever wonder what 22,333.6 lbs of ice cream cake looks like?

How about how it tastes?

Hundreds of curious onlookers at Yonge-Dundas Square got the answer Tuesday as Dairy Queen set the Guinness World Record for largest ice cream cake. They then served up the finished product to anyone who was craving a cool treat.

The cake, which took 22 volunteers to put together, beat the previous world record by about 4,000 lbs.

"We wanted to celebrate the cake's 30th birthday and what better way to do that than this?" said Denise Hutton, vice president of marketing for Dairy Queen Canada.

"It really is pretty exciting. We started this project over a year ago. We had University of Toronto engineering students help us and design the schematics of what needed to happen, we hired a production company that actually built the stage and obviously we needed the help of all our vendor partners, suppliers and franchisees," she told CP24.com.

The cake was made up of 3,300 large square slabs of vanilla ice cream, which were loaded onto 20 pallets inside a climate-controlled Vaughan warehouse on Saturday.

On Tuesday, a forklift brought the pallets into the square and lifted them onto the stage.

Volunteers topped the ice cream with 500 lbs of icing and crumbled Oreo cookies while officials with the Guinness Book of World Records looked on.

"The folks from Guinness were very impressed with how thorough and detailed we were and we have kept them apprised every step of the process, which is obviously pretty important when you are trying to set a record," said Hutton.

The cake beat the previous world record, an 18,000 lb monstrosity put together in Beijing five years ago, but it wasn't all about the glory.

Officials with Dairy Queen were also soliciting donations for the Children's Miracle Network.

That's what brought Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager Brian Burke and Olympic silver medalist curler Cheryl Bernard to Yonge-Dundas Square.

"They won the gold medal," Bernard said of the work of the 22 volunteers who put the cake together. "I had a couple pieces. The Oreo crumble was my favorite part."

A lineup snaked around Yonge-Dundas Square and onto a stretch of Dundas from noon to 2 p.m. as Torontonians joined Bernard in sampling the world-record cake.

"It was pretty awesome," said Andrew Gibson. "I'm on a break from school and it just seemed like a good idea to come down. You can't go wrong with free ice cream cake."

"I didn't think it would be that big," Martin Tenkortenaar added. "It's massive.

Hutton said there would be plenty of leftovers after everyone had a taste. She said Dairy Queen would break the cake up into smaller portions and donate them to charity, but not before Hutton got a piece.

"I'm just taking it all in right now, but I will absolutely have a piece," she said.