Jean AndersonAlmost as soon as I could walk, I'd toddle into the kitchen and beg my mother to let me help. She welcomed me (smart lady) and gave me simple jobs like fetching butter or eggs or cream from our shiny new refrigerator.

It was an enameled white box with a round compressor on top (to think that these old "monitor tops," now modernized, are showing up in today's retro kitchens!). Our refrigerator stood on sturdy legs and inside was a snug metal box that held two ice cube trays. These, the user's manual said, could also be used to freeze homemade ice cream.

There were several ice cream recipes in that little manual plus a few for "refrigerator cakes" -- layered loaves or logs constructed of cookies and whipped cream. My particular favorite was something called Zebra Cake, nothing more than an entire package of slim, dark chocolate wafers stuck together with sweetened whipped cream, then slathered with clouds of it. The recipe may have come from that user manual or more likely, it was something my mother clipped from the box of chocolate wafers. To be honest, I don't remember.

What I do remember is that a Zebra Cake had to sit in the refrigerator overnight to "glue" the cookie log together. Pretty amazing to my young mind, but nothing compared to the magic that happened when that log was sliced. That was Daddy's role -- with Mother stage-directing. Holding her sharpest knife at a forty-five degree angle, he would cut into the cake delivering slice after slice as boldly striped as a zebra.

After all these years, icebox cakes are back -- big time – thanks to the hot young chefs putting cool spins on their grandmothers' recipes. They've a world of ingredients from which to choose, things many grandmothers never heard of, things like hazelnut butter and fresh ginger, chèvre and mascarpone, blood oranges and lemongrass.

For home cooks, there are plenty of potential icebox-cake ingredients on supermarket shelves: frozen berries and fruit juice concentrates, frozen pound cakes and whipped toppings, candy brittles, ready-to-use chopped nuts, cake mixes of every flavor and texture. They may not be exotic, but these staples are just a whip and a stir from icebox cakes of surprising variety and elegance.

And here's a secret: If you set an icebox cake in the freezer before transferring it to the fridge, you increase the recipe possibilities ten-fold, maybe more, because fillings that never firm up in the refrigerator -- soft ice creams, for example -- quickly do so in the freezer. Besides, frozen icebox cakes can be made weeks ahead of time, then thawed and served as needed -- for fancy dinner parties as well as for informal family suppers.

The four recipes here were developed from the flavor memories of my childhood: a zebra-like icebox cake now with a creamy peanut-butter filling, a raspberry-angel whirligig that descends from my mother's long-ago recipe, a frosty creamsicle cake reminiscent of those orange-and-vanilla popsicles that were ours for a dime, and finally, icebox cupcakes -- pecan shortbread sandwiches filled and frosted with maple-caramel whipped cream.

• Tiger Cake recipe
• Creamsicle Cake recipe
• Pecan Shortbread Icebox Cupcakes recipe
• Raspberry Whirligig Angel Cake with Glazed Strawberries recipe
Related article: Who Invented Icebox Cakes?