Easy Summer Icebox Cake

The idea of icebox cake was perfect for the 1920s, when no one had air conditioning, and we certainly didn't want to fire up an oven to bake a cake in the heat of summer. But more and more people had their own icebox, or even a refrigerator. Recipes for icebox cake were good for selling newfangled processed foods and for selling refrigerators. The basic recipe is ready-made pastry such as cookies or graham crackers, layered with pudding and/or whipped cream, often with fruit and/or nuts.

In the video above, Claire Saffitz shows us how to make an icebox cake with plums and Biscoff. The printed recipe is at the YouTube page. But over the last 100 years, there have been as many recipes for icebox cake as there are cooks who don't want to bake in the summer. Find a roundup of those recipes at Metafilter, both in the post and in the comments.