The Cost of Making A Barefoot Contessa Cake

Specifically, the Mocha Icebox Cake

The occasion of a friend’s birthday always prompts a cake — a tradition that has carried over from college, I guess, or maybe earlier in our lives when we celebrated in bars with cheap beer and Funfetti cake or a cookie from the corner store with a candle stuck in it. If it’s someone’s birthday, there must be a cake — homemade, fancy, a day-long affair. In lieu of presents or streamers or those big Mylar balloons in the shape of numbers, a cake is just the thing. It’s impressive. It feels like care. And, generally, it can be cheap.

This past weekend, for my best friend’s birthday, I made a cake. In the past, he’s made me some real whoppers; I recall a red velvet cake creatively dyed pastel blue, with “green” cream cheese frosting that looked terrifying but tasted delicious. There have been chocolate cakes, yellow cakes, and one year’s attempt at a pudding cake that failed spectacularly. To return the favor this year, I turned to the wisdom of the Barefoot Contessa.

Mocha Chocolate Icebox Cake | Recipes | Barefoot Contessa

My friend and I have talked about this cake for a while now but never really had the occasion to make it. While maybe a cake like this does not require an occasion per se, it feels like it deserves one. The birthday was it.

An icebox cake in concept is simple and sounds relatively inexpensive — store-bought wafer cookies are sandwiched in between layers of homemade whipped cream then set in the refrigerator to relax over night. The cream softens the cookies to a cake-like consistency, the entire thing keeps its shape and when you cut into the thing, layers of effort are revealed for very little actual expended energy. If you play your cards right, this can be done on the cheap — a pint of heavy whipping cream, some Nilla wafers, a little vanilla and maybe some orange zest. I could’ve done that, but I wanted it to be special. For special, you turn to Ina.

Any casual viewer of The Barefoot Contessa can probably tell that Ina Garten is not cheap. It’s evident in the way she urges the viewer to use “good olive oil” and in the giant slabs of salmon wrapped in crisp brown paper, unwrapped on an extravagant kitchen island. Her water glasses look expensive. Her shirts are plain but probably cost over $200. Every recipe of hers is indulgent. The mocha icebox cake did not disappoint.

My first hint that this might be a costly endeavor was the three packages of Tate’s Cookies — notoriously delicious but also stupidly expensive. I had to buy a lot of things that some would consider staples, only because I rarely bake. I was concerned about the structural integrity of the cake itself, worried that the cookies might go from moist to soggy. In the end, the cake was delicious. It was worth every penny.

3 packages of Tate’s Cookies: $18

Vanilla extract: $5.79

Heavy cream: $4.39

A springform pan, because I wasn’t sure if we had one and it was required. Twist: we didn’t. And now we do: $11

Two containers of mascarpone: $7.38

Kahlua, the smallest size I could find, only because they didn’t have Kahlua Nips at the liquor store: $12.99

Cocoa powder: $6.69

Total: $66.24

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