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. (It is this thought, incidentally, that leads me to flavour the cream for the cake with coffee.) I’m nervous about their thickness compared with the usual American suspects but have discovered that most single-layer biscuits still work well and a slightly longer time in the fridge softening compensates for the thicker biscuit.

Icebox cake is named after the non-mechanical refrigerators that became widespread in the 1920s and 1930s. The cake grew popular among housewives for its simplicity and its use of pre-made components, with no need for baking. But its cult status was cemented by Nabisco who printed a recipe for it on the box for their chocolate wafer cookies.