Famous Cake for Breakfast

It's not strictly true that I had cake for breakfast this morning. I actually had a lovely omelette filled with fresh tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella cheese.

The cake was for dessert.

The entire meal was like summer on a plate, the omelette representing my grown-up fondness for Ensalada Caprese, the cake standing for all things summery childhood. The cake, you see, was something my mother had grown up eating because her mother had grown up eating it. She generally called it by the name of its ingredients: Famous Chocolate Wafer Cake, though occasionally she also called it an Icebox Cake.

This is a stunningly simple cake to make, requiring no baking whatsoever, and only about twenty minutes to prepare -- with one caveat: you have to find the ingredients first. And that can be tricky.

The ingredients list is short: 3 cups heavy whipping cream, plus a dab of vanilla and sugar that you have in your kitchen anyway, and 2 boxes Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers. The last has long been an elusive creature. Those narrow yellow boxes, filled with almost impossibly thin, near-black, very crunchy chocolate cookies, don't reside in plain sight in the cookie/cracker aisle of most grocery stores. Generally, if the store carries them at all, they are in one of three places: on the very top shelf in the cookie aisle, near the ginger snaps (such a short box on the top of such a high shelf = nearly invisible); near the end of the aisle with the fancy thin foreign wafer cookies (a laughably easy location which makes a mockery of the true challenge that lies in making this dessert); or on that tiny portable shelf in the ice cream aisle that holds all the hot fudge sauce and sprinkles and is never in the same location twice (a spot so ludicrous that if you find them there, as I did mine yesterday, you will rejoice in the feeling that the Universe has decreed that you are Deserving Person who Shall Have Icebox Cake, Huzzah!).

While the wafers have been very difficult to find, the cream has never historically been a problem; however, recently I notice that cream isn't what it used to be. I think it's thinner. I am sure THEY are reducing the fat content in it. Yesterday, the only cream in the store was "light whipping cream" (which won't actually whip up to peaks at all), and "whipping cream" (which will whip up to soft peaks if you work at it for such a long time that you think you've somehow missed the peaks stage and must be going downhill towards butter and watery whey. You aren't. You're just using crummy cream.) HEAVY whipping cream can be difficult to find, but it's the real deal.

Fair warning on the cream: Do not accept substitutes if you want this cake to shine. It is a cake from the good old days, back when cooks were not afraid of heavy cream. It will not succeed if you fear the ingredients.

So you put the three cups of heavy cream in a bowl with about 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract and 3 tablespoons of sugar, and whip it up until it forms nice stiff peaks.

Then, you open the package of cookies and start making a stack. Simply slather a dollop of cream onto the top of a cookie, then another, then another, stacking as you go.


When your stack is about ten cookies high, you can gently turn it on its side on the plate, and continue the process. Your goal is to make a long cookie roll. With two boxes of Famous Chocolate Wafers, you will need a large cake plate, and you will make three logs of cookies with cream in the middle. (Though it would be lovely to think that this cake is what inspired the Oreo, this cake didn't exist until the 1920s and Oreos were introduced in 1912, probably as a rip-off of the Hydrox cookies that Sunshine has debuted in 1908.) Now, here's the important part: don't be too skimpy with the cream in your assembly. You need a heavy dollop between each cookie because the cookies will soak up much of the cream and soften into a lovely cake-like consistency, and you don't want all the cream to disappear. What you see below represents me erring on the conservative side with the cream between the cookies. It wasn't perfect. So much of the cream absorbed that there were mere ribbons left when we cut into it.


Once you've got all three logs constructed and lying side-by-side, cover over the entire cake with the remaining cream. Again, don't be shy. What else are you going to use this whipped cream for, anyway? You need to use up all the cream. If you don't, the cookies will remain a bit stiff, and the cake will be a disappointment. Also, don't believe anyone who tells you that you can just let the cake rest for a few hours. You need to pop that baby into the fridge and leave it there overnight for the consistency to be right. (I know whereof I speak. I let it sit in the fridge for eight hours yesterday, and it wasn't enough.)


You should serve it straight from the fridge, and you cut it on the diagonal.* This produces lovely striped slices that will make you want to talk about zebras over dessert.


This is a cake from the pre-refrigerator days, back when people kept things chilled in tin-lined oak cabinets that had a bottom drawer to hold a huge hunk of ice. The cookies for this cake were introduced in the mid-1920s, and the recipe was so popular that it was printed on the packaging by 1929. Although many popular refrigerator desserts emerged in from the 1930s-1950s (thanks, in part to the first commercially-viable fridges being introduced in 1927), this cake has the honor of a simple name that speaks to its being the first of its kind: Icebox Cake. Just as it did back in the 20s, it tastes delicious with fresh berries and a cup of good coffee while sitting on the back deck and listening to the chorus of summer frogs.

For more history on the cake, including some fascinating tidbits on its relationship to those fabulously fussy, chilled 19th-century desserts called Charlottes, check out this Washington Post article.

*Note on the diagonal cutting: cut slices about 1/4" thick. The first few slices will be just the right size. Then, as you get well into the cake, you will find that one diagonal slice produces two pieces of cake -- unless you have friends who like to eat slabs of cake.