I’m going to go out on a limb here: you don’t need pie at any autumn celebration, including Thanksgiving. These meals can require a lot of shopping, planning, and cooking. So why not make dessert as easy as possible?
Here we present a deliciously simple option, Pumpkin Gingersnap Icebox Cake: It’s a no-bake, make-ahead dessert that comes together in minutes and feeds a crowd yet tastes so good that your guests will never guess you took the easy route.
Sign up for the Dinner Tonight newsletter!
Weeknight cooking inspiration, curated and written by longtime ATK author and editor (and avid home cook) Jack Bishop.
Like other desserts in the icebox cake family (see “The American Table” below), this is not actually a cake at all. Made of a spiced pumpkin cream layered with store-bought gingersnap cookies, it’s more akin to tiramisu or banana pudding. As the dish sits in the fridge overnight, the cookies soften to a cake-like texture, yielding a scoopable, creamy dessert. It’s rich and pleasantly sweet, so a little goes a long way.
The American Table
Icebox cakes were derived from French desserts called charlottes, trifle-like confections featuring segments of sponge or ladyfingers lining the edges of a mold and filled with custard and/or jam. As iceboxes (the predecessor to modern refrigerators) became more common in American homes in the 1920s, appliance and food manufacturing companies started publishing pared-down recipes for charlotte-type desserts and calling them icebox cakes. The most famous of these was printed on the packaging for (now discontinued) Nabisco's Famous Chocolate Wafers and featured simply the wafers layered with sweetened whipped cream. Icebox cake recipes continue to be popular with home cooks today, with modern versions featuring seemingly endless creative flavor combinations. (There’s an entire cookbook entitled Icebox Cakes dedicated to different variations of the cakes, written by Jean Sagendorph and Jessie Sheehan in 2015.)
To make it, you whip together a can of unsweetened pumpkin puree with a block of softened cream cheese for tangy flavor and silky body, plus brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt. Then you stream in heavy cream and continue to whip the mixture until it forms soft, billowy peaks. (With the pumpkin and cream cheese weighing down the cream, this takes longer than you might expect. Have patience; it looks loose at first but will come together.) Then you layer that mixture into a baking dish (your prettiest one!), alternating with gingersnap cookies.
Pumpkin Gingersnap Icebox Cake
A few pantry ingredients make this no-bake dessert easier than pie to throw together.
Get the RecipeAfter a night (or two if you’d prefer) spent in the refrigerator, the icebox cake is set and ready to serve. A final dusting of cocoa powder adds a rustic flourish and a bitter edge to help offset the decadent sweetness underneath.
