Making Icebox Cake with Mom

Icebox Cake was part of my childhood and I knew that making it with my mom now, would help bring back good memories for both of us. Icebox Cake was first introduced during WWI, but it was an Italian immigrant, Mrs. Ernestine Emanuel, who first made the icebox cake that I remember as a child. Just the name, icebox cake, conjures up a time gone by, before refrigerators, when food was kept cold by ice in an icebox. In those hot summer months, before airconditioning, when you didn’t want to heat up the house, but wanted to make a sweet treat, icebox cake supplied the answer. “Cooked” on top of the stove and then placed in the icebox to set, it became a big hit by the 1940’s. Ernestine created her icebox cake with graham crackers and pudding while she was on her honeymoon in Atlantic City, NJ. My mom’s icebox cake was a lot like Ernestine’s, but sometimes mom would use a layer of chocolate cake instead of graham crackers on the bottom layer. And sometimes she added a layer of sliced bananas in-between the layers of pudding. The icebox cake we made today has my own variation, instead of using regular graham crackers, I used chocolate graham crackers.

Use a 13″ x 9″ glass casserole dish.

Ingredients:

8 1/2 cup servings of chocolate pudding mix

8 1/2 cup servings of vanilla pudding mix

8 cup of milk

graham crackers

bananas

Directions:

Line glass casserole dish with graham crackers.

Add all packs of vanilla pudding mix into a pot on the stove and add 4 cups of milk (I use 2% milk). On medium heat, continue to mix while bringing pudding to a boil.

Pour hot vanilla pudding over first graham cracker layer.

Place another layer of graham crackers on top of vanilla pudding.

Slice bananas and place sliced bananas on top of the second layer of graham crackers.

Add all packs of chocolate pudding mix into a pot on the stove and add 4 cups of milk. On medium heat, continue to mix while bringing pudding to a boil.

Pour hot chocolate pudding over second layer of graham crackers and banana slices.

Place in refrigerator for at least an hour.