Summer comes early to San Antonio. I moved here in January, dodging the worst excesses of the northeastern winter, but by March, the temperature had already reached into the nineties. By the time you read this column, summer will be approaching the rest of the country as well. It’s no-bake dessert season.
I’ve always been intrigued by this genre of dessert recipe, which involves a vast spectrum of quality. The worst can be appalling — think of gelatin salads, gloppy pudding pies, packets of flavored powders and demeaning names like “mess” and “fool.” On the other hand, some no-bake desserts are transcendent: for example, panna cotta and the Magnolia Bakery banana pudding. A few summers ago, I was pleasantly surprised by results from a plastic popsicle mold I got for my nephews, when we experimented with fruit and yogurt. (Even if the results of this glorified arts-and-crafts project hadn’t been tasty, hearing a three-year-old pronounce “watermelon popsicle” would have been worth it.)
Now that the heat has me avoiding my oven, I decided to try a few new no-bake recipes. These are incredibly easy to find: every food and lifestyle magazine publishes an authoritative list of them each June. I chose the simplest I could find, from Parade: a four-ingredient cheesecake, selected as the best from a list of forty-two. Cheesecakes lend themselves especially well to the no-bake model, because packaged cream cheese gives that tangy flavor without much additional prep. In this recipe, cream cheese combines with sweetened condensed milk and lemon juice to create a confection that tastes fine but has a near-total lack of structural integrity. The overall effect is of a cheese-flavored pudding pie.
One food blog, Cooking Classy, features a cookie recipe my sister-in-law swears by, using cocoa powder, peanut butter, oats and a great deal of sugar and butter. Be careful with these. You’ll console yourself that they contain fiber and protein, but they’re as dangerous, and crushable, as a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
If making lighter desserts is your concern, I recommend the “Healthier Key Lime Bars” from the website Tasty. Swapping heavy cream with canned coconut milk and refined sugar with honey gives these bars a light, fresh, slightly tropical taste. The lower-fat content of coconut milk reminded me of Italian ice. I suggest doubling the crust for a heartier crunch.
At this point in my non-baking adventures, my husband, who thought I was experimenting with “no bacon” recipes, was starting to wonder why I had limited myself to dessert. So I enlisted him in my most simple, yet sophisticated, creation yet: an affogato.
His passion for espresso is undiminished by climate, and he was happy to whip up a fresh one for me. I added a dollop of Häagen-Dazs and a splash of amaretto. I suspect I’ve found the no-bake dessert of my long Texas summer.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2023 World edition.
