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Sunshine Refrigerator Cake
6 tablespoons cornstarch 4 cups milk 2 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup chopped nuts 8 pitted and chopped dates 8 chopped figs Make a paste of 1 cup milk with cornstarch. Add egg yolks slowly, salt and sugar. Add this to remaining milk which is scalding hot, stirring constantly. Cool, add vanilla, figs, nuts and dates. Line a springform pan with waxed paper. Cover bottom and also sides with chocolate wafers and add a thin layer of the filling. Keep alternating filling and wafers until pan is filled. Place in refrigerator for several hours or over night. Turn out on plate, garnish with meringue made of two egg whites and powdered sugar. Brown quickly in oven. Or use whipped cream on top.
This is a cornstarch custard layered with crisp chocolate wafers and chilled until the wafers soften into cake. The custard is the only part that can go wrong, and it goes wrong from undercooking.
- Cook the custard properlyStirring the starch-and-yolk slurry into scalding milk is not enough to set it. Keep it over the heat until it comes to a full boil and thickens, then hold it there 2 to 3 minutes, stirring, so the starch loses its raw taste and the yolks are cooked through. It should coat a spoon heavily; it firms further as it cools.
- LumpsSix tablespoons of cornstarch in 4 cups milk gives a stiff pudding. If it seizes into lumps, press it through a sieve while hot rather than beating it, which thins starch-set custard permanently.
- Cool before filling"Cool, add vanilla" means cool to lukewarm at least. Pour warm custard over the wafers and they dissolve to paste instead of firming into layers. A round of waxed paper laid on the surface stops a skin forming.
- Chocolate wafersThe recipe assumes the thin, dry, barely sweet chocolate wafer sold for exactly this purpose, which is no longer easy to find. Any very crisp thin chocolate cookie works; avoid soft or cream-filled ones, which will not absorb liquid the same way.
- Lining the panParchment is easier to release than waxed paper. Line the base and a collar up the sides, and note that the springform is used only as a mould here, so a loaf pan or straight-sided dish serves as well.
- Chilling timeSeveral hours is the minimum; overnight is better and firmer. The wafers need time to draw moisture from the custard, which is the whole mechanism of a refrigerator cake.
- The meringue"Brown quickly in oven" means a very hot oven for two or three minutes, or a few seconds under a broiler; the recipe gives no temperature. The chilled cake must go in and out fast so the custard does not slacken. Whites browned this briefly stay largely uncooked, so use pasteurized whites if that is a concern, or take the whipped cream option.
- Fruit and yieldThe dates and figs are dried fruit; chop them small so they do not tear the wafer layers. No yield is given, but a cake this size and this rich would probably cut into 8 to 10 narrow wedges.
Refrigerator or "icebox" cakes belong to the era of the domestic icebox and early mechanical refrigeration, when a cook with a reliably cold box could set a dessert without an oven and advertise the fact by naming the appliance in the title. A whole genre followed: chocolate wafers or ladyfingers layered with custard, whipped cream or fruit, left to soften overnight into something sliceable. The technique is often credited to cookie and cracker manufacturers, who printed such recipes on packages to sell wafers, though variations on softened biscuit puddings are far older than the refrigerator. The two eggs split between yolks for the custard and whites for the meringue is old-fashioned household thrift dressed in new equipment.