Chocolate Cookies and Cream Icebox Towers

My first encounter with icebox towers was at our friend Amelia's house last summer, when it was way too hot for baking anything. She had been eyeing (or previously made and wanted to repeat, I can't remember) the icebox tower from Smitten Kitchen, so she picked up some brownie brittle and local strawberries, I whipped some heavy cream, and eight hours later we had a glorious dessert. A few weeks ago, she made a chocolate peanut butter icebox cake (also from Smitten Kitchen) for her husband's birthday, and it was similarly delicious. My first solo foray into the world of icebox desserts was with these chocolate cookies and cream icebox towers from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking (the recipe for which I could not for the life of me find in the book).

Although icebox towers are billed as an easy summer dessert, intended for when it's too hot to bake, that's because they usually involve packaged wafer cookies (or graham crackers) and Cool Whip (or whipped cream). Since this is Baked, we're making everything from scratch, and their take on an icebox tower cake involves quite a few steps. When you start making your own cookies, plus three different cream-based fillings, I think a dessert can no longer be classified as "simple". None of the steps are especially time-consuming, but they're certainly more work than making a batch of no-bake cookies or even regular cookies. First, you'll make a batch of butter-y chocolate wafer dough. Making the dough is easy and only takes about 15 minutes: first you beat together ¾ cup each of softened butter and confectioner's sugar (85 grams), then once they are combined, you'll beat in an egg and a little vanilla extract. At this point, my batter would not come together into a cohesive mixture, so I raised the speed a little to medium-high for about 20 seconds so everything was mostly a stable emulsion, but it turned back to a broken mixture pretty quickly as you can see. Next you add ¾ cup of cocoa powder (65 grams) and a little salt. Because this recipe is all about the chocolate, and these cookies are all about the cocoa powder, it is in your best interest to use the highest-quality cocoa powder you can get your hands on since whatever you select is going to be the dominant flavor in these towers. After the cocoa powder and salt have been combined with the wet ingredients, you gently stir in the flour. At the start of adding the flour, it really seemed like 1-¼ cups (175 grams) was too much flour for the rest of the dough to support, but I was wrong and the flour mixed in without much issue. At this point, the dough needs to be chilled for at least an hour.

In the meantime, you should make the chocolate pastry cream. As with the chocolate cookies, this step is relatively quick and easy. Whisk together 3 egg yolks, 50 grams of sugar, 15 grams of flour, and a pinch of salt until the mixture is a smooth, shiny pale yellow. Melt 3 ounces of bittersweet chocolate (I used Ghiradelli). Heat 1 cup of half-and-half until steaming, then pour half the half-and-half into the egg yolk mixture while you whisk constantly to incorporate. Pour the warmed egg yolk-half-and-half into the small pan with the remaining half-and-half, then continue to whisk constantly over moderate heat for about 6 minutes until the mixture is substantially thickened. [Make sure your whisk reaches into the edges of the pan you use!] My pastry cream showed signs of thickening after 2 minutes, but I kept going the full 6 minutes, at which point it had thickened up enough that lines were left in the cream by the whisk and it had the consistency of sour cream. You stir in the melted chocolate and vanilla, then strain the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve. [Don't skip this straining step!] Press clingfilm or parchment paper against the surface of the hot pastry cream to prevent a skin from forming, and chill the cream in the refrigerator for an hour. This step took me about 30 minutes, which meant if I'd made the components in this order, I would have had another 30 minutes to wait before the dough was ready to roll out and bake.... since I made my pastry cream the night before making the cookie dough, I spent the intervening hour making a batch of regular chocolate chip cookie dough and a batch of foccacia dough for Breads' shakshuka foccacia.

One neat thing about using other people's kitchens is sometimes you get to try out tools you've been coveting for years, like the uniform ¼" rolling pin from J. K. Adams. Matt and Renato's instructions call for rolling out the dough to ¼" thickness, then using a 2-½" round cutter to generate ~32-34 cookies. This dough is quite sticky; I needed about ½ cup of flour total to roll it out, and it also tended to crack all across the dough's surface. After rolling out the two refrigerated rounds of dough separately, then combining the scraps another 3-4 times, I managed to collect 26 round cookies plus 1 misshapen cookie from my dough, and since I used the perfect rolling pin, at least I know the difference wasn't because of erroneous thickness.

After cutting out the chocolate wafer cookies, you bake them at 325°F for ~10-12 minutes. I baked mine for exactly 10 minutes, rotating them halfway through, and those 10 minutes were all they needed to be just set through the middles. The cookies are quite delicate, and they need to cool on the pans for about 10 minutes before you can transfer them to the wire rack to finish cooling. They need to be completely cooled before you think about putting the cream fillings on them, so I let them cool for about an hour.

The final two components of Baked's icebox towers is the lightly-sweetened vanilla whipped cream, a portion of which is combined with the chocolate pastry cream to make a chocolate whipped cream. First, you beat 1 cup of heavy cream with a teaspoon each of vanilla extract and powdered sugar. My heavy cream would not whip. It took ages before it finally thickened to any visible degree, and I finally gave up after about 10 minutes, at which point I had whipped cream that would barely hold a peak. You'll whisk together 3 tablespoons of the chocolate pastry cream with ¾ cup of the whipped cream, at which point, you have your three different fillings and your cooled chocolate cookies. Still with me? Wondering why we didn't just make a simple batch of no-bake cookies? or a mousse? or fruit salad with whipped cream/yogurt/sour cream? Yeah, me too.

Since you're supposed to have 30 cookies to fill, but I only had 27, I separated my cookie rounds into double rows of 11, 5, and 11, then filled three small ziploc bags (no piping bags here) with the three different fillings. Chocolate pastry cream went on 11 of the rounds, the light chocolate whipped cream went on 5 rounds, and the regular whipped cream went on the remaining 11 rounds. I had a tiny amount of chocolate pastry cream left over, a little whipped cream, and quite a bit of the chocolate whipped cream, so I decorated a few of the whipped cream-topped cookies with a little dollop of chocolate pastry cream, but there wasn't enough for all 5 towers.

Here's the dilemma about icebox towers: they're meant to be a warm weather dessert, where you don't have to do much, if any, baking. However, they generally contain whipped cream-based fillings, which tend to melt and puddle at alarming rates when it's hot outside. It's something of a conundrum, and I found myself wishing I had A) enough refrigerator space for every individual cookie because B) why didn't I listen to myself and not stack the towers as high as the recipe directs us to ...?

My whipped cream was already weeping, and I thought to myself, self, stacking these super delicate cookies 5 high with this super fragile, none-to-stable cream in-between some of the layers seems like a bad idea. But, that's what the recipe told me to do and there was no room in the fridge to fit all the cookies, much less the 16 that had regular/chocolate whipped cream on their tops, so I foolishly plunged forward with stacking my icebox towers. As I was taking photos of the first three that I managed to stack (barely - and only because so much cream squished out), all three wobbled over and I only just caught one tower from toppling off the table.

I decided not to be an obstinate fool and I quickly transferred those leaning towers into ceramic plates with high enough sides to support the wobbling towers. Transferring these was a mess, and I realized I should have build them in whatever container I planned to refrigerate them in. Those cookies that I had only stacked 2-3 layers high I put on separate plates and tucked in the fridge to help firm them up too. At this point, I tried one of the smaller cookie towers just to see how they tasted before the mandated 6 hour refrigeration period. It was fine, quite cocoa-heavy, but nothing worth all the work I'd put into these. I know, these aren't meant to be eaten straightaway, but I was curious. This initial taste also made me realize people who aren't chocoholics would likely prefer these with some strawberries, raspberries, or cherries layered in with the cream(s) or served alongside the chocolate towers.

I put the one-bite-missing tower in a bowl, added three tablespoons of the leftover chocolate whipped cream, then an hour and a half of refrigeration later, I tried my tester tower again. It was much better. The cookies had begun absorbing some of the flavoring from the three creams, and the creams had firmed up, which had the effect of transforming the tower into a cohesive mini-cake that was super chocolate-y and delicious. I could easily cut into the cookies with my spoon and eat the icebox cake as a cohesive dessert.

Eight hours (and one sprained ankle later), I served the three somewhat presentable 5 layer towers to myself and Caleb's parents. Verdict - good, but nothing particularly special, and incredibly difficult to eat. The cookies were quite firm, so you couldn't cut through the towers without shooting whipped cream out the middle.

If I were to make these mini chocolate cookies and cream icebox tower cakes again I would:

• use wide glasses to form the towers. This would be less pretty perhaps, but game-changing.
• chill my mixing bowl prior to whipping the heavy cream.
• add a bottom layer of the light chocolate whipped cream before adding a cookie to the glass.
• use more whipped cream in the middle and on top.
• add some sliced strawberries or cherries on top of several filling layers.

If I wasn't using glassware to make the towers, I would:

• refrigerate my whipped cream (and chocolate whipped cream) for at least 30 minutes before using it to fill the cookies.
• put a layer of plastic wrap down on my serving platter to enable lifting the stacks after refrigeration.
• make stacks of 2-3 layers of each and chill them for 1 hour before finishing the assembly.

Head over the Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of these chocolate-y summer treats! I'll keep the chocolate pastry cream recipe in my back pocket, because it's delicious, but otherwise I'm unlikely to return to these towers.