The no-bake bliss of icebox cake

Standing in the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket, I’m overwhelmed by possibilities. This isn’t unusual for me, but normally it’s fuelled by greed, and resolved by buying them all. Today I have to make a choice. I am making an American icebox cake, which requires a lot of one type of biscuits, and the structure and flavour of the whole cake depends on them.

The problem is that the three most popular biscuits for the pudding are not easily available here: graham crackers, Oreo thins and Nabisco chocolate wafers. I almost feel relief when I discover that the classic icebox biscuit, the Nabisco chocolate wafer, was discontinued last year. There has been much panic on the internet about this, and many attempts to recreate them at home. But while authenticity is a noble aim, it doesn’t feel terribly in the spirit of a no-bake cake if you’re baking the biscuits yourself, does it?

Eventually, I plump for gingernuts, thinking of their firmness, their almost granular crunch in the virgin state, but also how they yield when dunked in a hot drink.