SMS: Lemon Ice Box Cake

When I read the name of this weeks Sweet Melissa Sunday's bake I was more than intrigued. I've never tried an ice box cake, never mind made one. My curiosity was doubled when I read the recipe through and realised it was shockingly similar to the Lemon Meringue Pie recipe I love so much, only rather than being baked, it's frozen. How delightfully odd. This one's all down to the lovely Jennifer of Keep Passing Open Windows. Excellent choice Jennifer, kudos ;)


As I've missed the last two Sweet Melissa Sundays I was dying to get back into the swing of things and dove head first into the kitchen clutching a huge bag of lemons! But, being one of the only English bakers in the group, I encountered a few problems, Vanilla Wafers being the first! What on Earth are Vanilla Wafers, cookies, wafers, big, small? Eeeeep, a little digging told me they're small vanilla flavoured cookies but unfortunately, I couldn't find anything similar in the supermarkets here so I decided to use a tried and tested replacement for Graham Crackers instead, Hob Nobs. The second problem appeared to be one several of the SMS bakers encountered, waiting for the lemon custard to turn thick and fluffy. I whisked, whisked and whisked some more but it just didn't seem to change. After about 20 minutes, I gave up and folded in the egg whites regardless. Not that it seemed to matter much, the cake turned out beautifully and was exactly what I expected, a frozen lemon meringue pie. Nom!



I wasn't a fan of the Strawberry sauce when paired with the cake, wonderful on its own but I don't like anything to taint the flavour of lemon. Not in my house!

As usual, take a peak at the wonderful, beautiful SMS bakers to see what they came up with!


As you can see from the above picture, when removing the base of the cake tin and greaseproof paper I lost half of the brown layer of meringue. But, I actually preferred the cake with the snowy white topping, I thought it looked much more appetising :)