Classic Icebox Cake Recipe

With summertime upon us, I find myself looking for no-bake desserts that still satisfy. Just because the weather's hot doesn't mean I don't want cake—I'd just prefer not to have to heat up my apartment to get my fix. Enter the icebox cake. A chance discovery of chocolate wafer cookies at my local grocery store inspired me to attempt Nabisco's "Famous Chocolate Refrigerator Roll," a simple log-like icebox cake consisting of cookies and whipped cream.

When I think of icebox cakes, I think retro. I think of my convenience cooking-loving grandma. But as much as icebox cakes may seem like a product of the 1950s, flipping through old cookbooks I found recipes for "ice-box cakes" as far back as the 1915 edition of The Settlement Cookbook, compiled by Mrs. Simon Kander. These early versions of icebox cakes were made with ladyfingers, sort of like an all-American tiramisu.

Nabisco didn't invent the icebox cake but they sure did make it famous by featuring it on the front of their chocolate wafer packages. The front-of-package-photo alone does an admirable job of making you want to take a box of cookies home. The chocolate cake looks like the epitome of gracious summer entertaining, with not a dollop of cream out of place. Flavor-wise, it exudes a cookies and cream vibe all the way (actually the cream moistened cookies, a.k.a cake, remind me of the taste and texture of Good Humor chocolate ice cream sandwich cookies—in the very best way.) You can either stick with the traditional whipped cream filling or easily dress it up with a little mint extract, either way it's a win.

The instructions for Nabisco's "Famous Chocolate Refrigerator Roll" seem simple enough: make a tower of cookie and whipped cream sandwiches, lay said tower on its edge, and cover with whipped cream. Yet in practice, few homemade versions I've encountered online match the perfection of the product shot from the wafer package. The Cooking Channel blog inspired me to try putting the cake together in a loaf pan and that worked like a charm. Decorate this cake anyway you want: you can cover the outside with crumbled pieces of extra cookies or go a totally traditional route.

This recipe is adapted from the recipe off the back of boxes of Nabisco's Famous Chocolate Wafers. If you can't get chocolate wafers in your area, the Smitten Kitchen has a chocolate wafer cookie recipe that's a good approximation, though in my experience the homemade cookies didn't quite get as soft from the cream as the store-bought kind.