A beautiful and delicate Easter dessert.

This is a very simple dessert, with, technically, three ingredients: holiday bread, including stale holiday bread, candy canes, and stabilized whipped cream. And if you expect to finish the dessert in one sitting, you don’t even need to stabilize the whipped cream.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a self-made tradition of using candy canes from my Christmas tree to make an Easter Sunday dessert. This recipe, however, did not start out as an Easter offering. When I first marked this recipe to try, after browsing through the Lakota, North Dakota, All Loved and Cherished Wonders, it was because I had a bag of pre-crushed Heath bar that I’d picked up on the discount shelf of the local grocery.

But, combined with having some makeshift Christmas bread that was about to go stale, I decided to holidize the recipe and switch out the chocolate wafers for toasted bread, and the crushed Heath bars for crushed candy canes. The original recipe ran:

Heath Bar Dessert

1 box chocolate wafers, crushed	¼ cup butter (melted)
10 Heath Bars (ground)	1 pint heavy whipping cream

Combine crumbs and melted butter. Press half of crumbs into large cake pan, cover with half of layer of Heath bars. Spread with heavy whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining crumbs and Heath bars.

Mrs. Pat Kuball

Right off the bat you can see some problems with this recipe, problems common with vintage recipes and the assumption of unchanging product sizes. The cook book is, by my estimate, from about 1964. What was a box of chocolate wafers in 1964? How big were Heath Bars?

What even were chocolate wafers? My guess is that the chocolate wafers referred to a product like Nabisco Famous Wafer Cookies, which were often used in no-bake desserts like this. At the time that they were discontinued around 2023, they came in 9-ounce packages. At some point well in the past, they came in 10-ounce tins, which probably would not be described as a box. I was unable to find what packaging or what size they came in in the sixties.

I chose to guess 12 ounces for the sixties or a little earlier as recipes are often trailing indicators of product size. Since the one semi-specific instruction is to use a “large cake pan”, which I strongly suspect is a 9x13 pan, I chose to half the recipe and use an 8x8 pan. So, I guessed at six ounces of toasted bread. This turned out to work perfectly, which makes me suspect a ten to twelve ounce package for the cookies.

If you do choose to make the original recipe with chocolate wafer cookies, both Southern Living and America’s Test Kitchen have substitute recipes. But I’d suggest Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful Chocolate-Cayenne Cocktail Cookies as a replacement. They’re one of my favorites, and even made it into my Traveling Man’s Cookery. The chocolate-cayenne combo ought to be perfect with either Heath bars or candy canes.

Heath bars came in multiple sizes at the time. Since one of their packages was literally a bag of six “10¢ bars”, I chose to use that as the reference. It contained one-ounce bars; ten of them would be 10 ounces. So I used five ounces of candy canes in my half recipe. This provided more than enough crushed peppermint.

I got my holiday bread recipe from the third volume of Donna Rathmell German’s wonderful Bread Machine Cookbook series. It’s technically a white chocolate and macadamia nut bread, but add a half cup of those green and/or red holiday candied cherries and you’ve got a great, quick, Christmas bread or Easter bread.

White Chocolate Macadamia Bread

Servings: 16
Preparation Time: 4 hours
Donna Rathmell German
The Donna Rathmell German Bread Machine Cookbook collection
The Bread Machine Cookbook III (paperback)^•

Ingredients

• ¾ cup milk
• 3 tbsp butter
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup white chocolate chips
• 1-½ tsp almond extract
• 3 tbsp sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 14 oz flour
• 2 tsp yeast
• ⅔ cup chopped macadamia nuts
• ½ cup chopped candied fruit (optional)

Steps

1. Heat the milk with the butter just to melt.
2. Stir the eggs into the milk when cool enough.
3. Pour into the bread machine’s pan.
4. Add remaining ingredients in order, possibly saving the nuts and candied fruit until the bread machine asks for it.
5. Use the sweet bread or white bread setting, with a light crust.

Because this dessert can use stale holiday bread, it may work even better over the Christmas season. When I made it, I made the bread for Christmas, and I used what remained of the loaf on New Year’s Eve to make the dessert for New Year’s Day.

On the other hand, by making it for Easter you can make the dessert right after making the Easter Bread. This will ensure that you still have Easter bread available.

If you want to keep the dessert for several days, or if you need to serve it at room temperature, you will want to stabilize your whipped cream. This is simple enough; just add some gelatin to the cream as you whip it.

Stabilized Whipped Cream

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Irma S. Rombauer
The Joy of Cooking (1943) (Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp cold water
• ½ tsp gelatin
• 8 oz whipping cream
• 3 tbsp powdered sugar (optional)

Steps

1. In a small glass dish, sprinkle gelatin over cold water without stirring.
2. Let sit for about 5 minutes to moisten throughout.
3. Bring a pan of water to a boil.
4. Place glass dish in boiling water for a few minutes until the mixture becomes transparent.
5. Cool to room temperature before using.
6. Whip cream.
7. Add the gelatin as the cream begins to thicken.
8. If adding sugar, add to cream after the gelatin.

Or, of course, commercial whipped topping should also be fine. But stabilizing whipped cream with gelatin is a simple technique that I first ran across in The Joy of Cooking. It is invaluable when making a whipped cream dessert for a small number of people or well ahead of time. It ensures that leftovers will still be good for the next day’s breakfast or even throughout the weekend if the gathering was on a Friday evening.

These kind of no-bake desserts always fascinate me. This particular one is literally just whipped cream sandwiched between two layers of crumbs and crushed candy. The crumb layers absorb some of the cream while setting, forming a sweet but delicate crust. It’s a marvelous dessert. And a marvelous breakfast.