My Chocolate Malt Fridge Cake

A simple and delicious creamy chocolate malt fridge cake that can be whipped up in minutes with a few basic ingredients, most of which might already be in your cupboard.

When my brother and I were little, our mum used to make this amazing fridge cake. I remember it well, a log of biscuity chocolatey goodness sitting in the refrigerator on a hot day, and us waiting for a slice after dinner. A while ago I started thinking about this fridge cake, and asked my mum for the recipe. Well, my mum is one of those people who most of the time cook instinctively and don’t really follow recipes. Her meat patties are pretty famous, yet her reply to my requests for details is usually “I used whatever I had at the time”. When I asked about the fridge cake, which she hasn’t made in too many years for me to mention, she couldn’t even remember the ingredients let alone the quantities. In the end, she came up with a list based on her memory to an extent, but also on the logic of what she would have been likely to use, depending on availability and cost of ingredients in Greece at the time. For example we knew it was petit beurre biscuits (cookies), as the options back then were pretty limited (you had to fly all the way to England to get a digestive biscuit). It would have been cocoa instead of chocolate, and margarine instead of butter due to cost. Add a bit of sugar to the above and Bob’s your uncle, fridge cake.

Do I sound a hundred years old talking about things that weren’t available here “back then”? Well, I can tell you this. Times have changed. From the digestive biscuit that was worth its weight in gold (and now there’s even a Greek brand), to salt and vinegar crisps, to celery (proper big fat stalks, not the stuff that looks like parsley) there is a whole variety of foodstuff that I would dream about in between trips to the UK, and can now pick up from the supermarket anytime. I could talk for hours about all the things I missed, and still miss about British food. But it’s definitely better now (I’ve even got a jar of banoffee curd in my cupboard).

So back to the fridge cake. When I started my testing to see what quantities would work best, I got a brainwave. It must have been when I was beating the butter and sugar, when my mind drifted to buttercream frosting. I love it, but I love cream cheese frosting more. So, in went the cream cheese. And because I had some hot chocolate powder in the cupboard, I thought I’d try adding some of that together with the cocoa in order to get a lighter chocolatey taste, rather than the deep richness that the cocoa would give on its own. The next time I made the fridge cake, as I reached for the hot chocolate I saw my box of Horlicks next to it. Well why not? In it went. The result made me very very happy. The Mister loved it too, but I ate most of it, secretly. And a final tip: in hot weather this is a good one to keep in the freezer.