currently cooking: magnolia bakery's icebox cake

When my Mom came to visit for her birthday a few years ago, we spent several minutes ogling the icebox cake in Magnolia Bakery's case. While we "settled" for cupcakes that day, I secretly spent months after the encounter trying to rationalize a reason to buy the whole $26 cake!

That is until now.

This week I received Magnolia Bakery's cookbook thanks to a special giveaway at my office (hooray for working for the publisher). I immediately set my sights on creating that scallop-edged beauty of a cake at home.

First note? This cake is no bake and requires very few ingredients. In short? Score!

The first order of business is to create the whipped cream.

Since this was my first foray into whipping cream, I relied on my handy mixer to take the mixture of heavy cream, sugar and vanilla extract from liquid

to thicker liquid

to (finally) whipped cream!

The next step is simply assembly.

Place six chocolate wafers on a flat cake or cake stand (5 in a circle with the sixth placed in the middle) and add 3/4 of a cup of your freshly whipped cream between each layer.

Keep arranging the wafers in the same formation and adding your whipped cream until you've gone through one and a half packages of the wafers....and almost all of your cream.

The last bit of whipped cream goes on top. Add thinly sliced strawberries for a summery touch.


Refrigerate for at least five hours before serving and brace yourself for mad love from all that sample ...or eat half the cake (you know who you are)!

Check out a more detailed recipe here.