My friend Valerie recently made an icebox cake, made of chocolate wafers and whipped cream. The whipped cream is layered with the chocolate wafers in a dish, and then through the magic of refrigeration, the moisture from the cream makes the wafers soggy, giving them a cake-like texture. I liked how it tasted, and there was no baking involved.
So then I ran across this recipe for strawberry icebox cake, and I decided to try it out for myself. This one involved graham crackers instead of chocolate wafers. The original recipe was for a 9×13 baking dish and said it served 8 (that means each person can eat a square that’s over 3.5 inches on each side, by the way). I thought I could halve the ingredients and make it in an 8×8 dish.
Strawberry Icebox Cake
1 pound strawberries, sliced
1 1/2 cups whipping cream
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 sleeves graham crackers
So first, I whipped the 1 1/2 cups of cream with the powdered sugar and the vanilla extract. The whipped cream is barely sweet.
I put a layer of whipped cream on the bottom of an 8×8 baking dish, with a layer of graham crackers on top of that.
Then another layer of whipped cream on top of that, followed by a layer of sliced strawberries.
And then another layer of whipped cream, another layer of graham crackers, another layer of whipped cream on top of that, another layer of sliced strawberries, and then yet another layer of whipped cream on top of the strawberries.
According to the recipe, you should end up with four layers of graham crackers, but I ran out of whipped cream at this point. How they managed to get double the number of layers in a baking dish with almost twice the area with just double the ingredients is beyond me. Maybe they’re more efficient with the whipped cream layering.
And then there’s some ganache.
2 tablespoons whipping cream
1 ounce dark chocolate, finely chopped
You just heat the cream until it’s bubbling, and then pour it over the dark chocolate. Stir until it’s smooth.
I put another layer of sliced strawberries on top of the final layer of whipped cream, and then I drizzled the ganache on top.
It’s not that pretty, I’ll admit. But for a no-bake dessert, I thought this was pretty good. It doesn’t taste overly sweet, since the cream is barely sweetened, and the graham crackers aren’t that sweet, either. You get the taste of fresh strawberries in a cool, cake-like dessert.
Next time, maybe I’ll try using pudding instead of whipped cream. And ladyfingers instead of graham crackers, perhaps. It took an awful lot of whipped cream to make not that big of a dessert, so I felt vaguely guilty eating something that was mostly whipped cream.
And once again, I’ve cheated by filing this under “Baking.”