Our Chocolate Wafers Are Just as Good as the Ones Nabisco Killed

Every year at big celebrations such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was my duty to use the cookies to make the icebox cake printed on the back of the Famous Wafers’ bright yellow package (a dessert my family affectionately dubbed “zebra cake”).

I’d whip cream with a splash of vanilla and use it to glue together tall stacks of the elegantly thin cookies. I’d lay the stacks side by side on a plate and cover the assemblage with even more whipped cream. After a few hours in the refrigerator, the cookies would absorb moisture from the cream and soften into sliceable layers with alternating bands of black and white.

But icebox cakes weren’t the only thing the wafers were famous for. With their strikingly dark, almost black color and smooth, deep chocolate flavor, Famous Wafers were also the essential choice for chocolate cookie crumb crusts in ice cream cakes, pies, and bar cookies.

Then just over a year ago, after nearly 100 years of production, Nabisco abruptly stopped making them.

Devotees, including me, were incredulous. Furious, even. How could the company take away a cookie that was so cherished—and without explanation?

As supplies have dwindled, bereft fans formed petitions to lobby for their return and banded together on Facebook to help track down remaining boxes.  

Thus far, Nabisco has not responded to appeals to bring back the cookies.

But we have. We created our own chocolate wafers.   

Deputy Food Editor Andrea Geary’s dupe recipe comes as close to the original as any homemade version can get, with a dusky brown hue, the ideal crispness, that distinctive chocolate flavor (shared by Nabisco’s Oreo cookies), and the thinness that made the cookie absorb just the right amount of moisture in an icebox cake.

Here are her most important discoveries:

1. Use Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa Powder. Like all Dutch-processed cocoa powders, this one has been treated with an alkalizing agent that darkens the color, while also neutralizing the pH and mellowing astringency. But we suspect this product also includes the black cocoa powder that gave Famous Wafers its distinctive taste and color. (Oreo cookies are also made with this.) Black cocoa powder has been treated with an especially strong alkaline solution that increases its pH, turns it ultra-dark, and adds deeper, earthier flavors. For cookies with a similar taste and color as the commercial kind, this is the cocoa powder to use.

2. Don’t forget cocoa powder has starch. To avoid overly dry cookies, we adjusted the amount of flour accordingly to account for this. 

3. Omit egg. Eggs cause cookies to puff, and we wanted to keep ours as flat as possible. 

4. Use baking soda, but skip baking powder. Baking powder can lead to more lift in the oven, while baking soda contributed the spread that helped the cookie achieve the desired crispness. Baking soda also deepened its color. 

5. Swap granulated sugar for confectioner’s sugar. Granulated sugar led to cookies that were more hard and crunchy versus delicate and snappy. That’s because after melting in the heat of the oven, granulated sugar forms a harder, more crystalline structure as it cools than confectioner’s sugar does.