As much as summertime dials down most folks’ desire to turn on the oven, it doesn’t do much to slake a sweet tooth, even as homemade baked goods have to wait for cooler days. But there are still a few classic goodies that eschew any heat source at all. An easy, three-ingredient, no-bake cheesecake is a cornerstone of the genre. Something like matcha pistachio popsicles are even less expected, and on the extreme end of the refreshing temperature spectrum. And icebox cake — haven’t heard that name in years — is right up there with the Fahrenheit-free best of ’em.
All you need to make an icebox cake is some whipped cream, wafer cookies, layering skills, and the refrigerator that modern times have allowed us to take for granted. Most preparations will have you arrange a base of cookies, cover it with the whipped cream, and keep repeating until you’ve erected a pretty convincing cake shape with near zero of the skills or steps required to actually do so. The majority of the magic that really brings the thing together is passive, as the dessert simply sits in the icebox — err, refrigerator — for the cookies to soften and approximate actual cake layers. And it all coalesces deliciously.
A brilliant jazz age invention, or at least association, plus a tasty flavor addition
While we generally tend to believe that people were basically making most recipes before they were ever formally published or just became popular, the icebox cake’s very name convincingly links it to the 1920s. Before the home refrigeration that we know today, iceboxes, literal metal-lined wooden boxes fitted with ice slabs, were all the rage in the flapper era. The paucity of residential air conditioning would have also made the icebox cake particularly attractive in those sweltering dog days.
Now a person can cool their kitchen so effectively that you’d never know what the weather is like outside. But it can still feel unseemly to crank up the oven when it’s super hot out. So all roads lead back to the icebox cake. Originally intended for comfort and convenience, it’s still great mostly unadorned. But even just a few extra steps and ingredients, such as in this frozen mango float icebox cake recipe, can leave you with an even more ornate finished product, and still without breaking a sweat.
