I have been meaning to write about no-bake desserts since June, but each week another dish or book or cook has grabbed my attention. With Labor Day (and fall!) looming, this is just about my last chance to feature a dessert that doesn’t require a warm oven.

I was heading to a pot-luck event last week, and I planned to create a riff on the classic Ice Box Cake, beloved of my mother and my grandmother. As most readers probably know, this “cake,” also called Zebra Cake, involves layering round, thin chocolate cookies with whipped cream and chilling the mixture.

It was inspired by Nabisco’s Famous Chocolate Wafers, introduced in 1924 by the National Biscuit Company. By 1929, with iceboxes (refrigerators’ predecessors) arriving in most American homes, the company was including a recipe for Icebox Cake on the package for the cookies.

An Icebox Cake is like a trifle, but it’s a lot easier to throw together. All you need to do is alternate cookies and whipped cream, then allow the “cake” to refrigerate for at least four hours; this gives the cream and the chocolate cookies the opportunity to meld.

Over the years, I have served variations of this cake. I have used graham crackers instead of the chocolate wafers. (They were edible but lacked the oomph of the chocolate.)

One of my favorite riffs is to flavor the whipped cream with a little raspberry liqueur, like Chambord, and a few semi-crushed raspberries. Last week I was planning to do the raspberry version. Raspberries and chocolate taste divine together.

Unfortunately, I discovered that Nabisco’s Famous Chocolate Wafers, never easy to find, have completely disappeared from grocery-store shelves.

It turns out that Mondelez International, Nabisco’s parent company, has “delisted” the cookies, according to the Washington Post and Facebook’s Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers Fan Club.

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The fan club’s content moderator wrote to Nabisco, only to be informed that the wafers had been removed from store shelves for quality-control issues. I find this excuse hard to swallow. Nabisco makes Oreos, for goodness’ sake. The popular sandwich cookies may be addictive, but no one has ever described them as high in quality.

The Post suggested several commercial alternatives to the wafers, most of which looked difficult to find. The reporter there said she had had luck with Oreo thins, but those seem rather small to me for this much of a cake.

I’m a reasonably good baker, and I could create a chocolate wafer. I probably will at some point in the future. That process seems to defeat the idea of a no-bake cake, however.

Fortunately, as my pot luck approached, I remembered my neighbor Florette’s warm-weather standby, an ice-cream concoction she dubbed Hawley Torte.

I’m not sure where the name came from. It could be that she named the “torte” after our town because she invented it here. Perhaps she believed that its slightly rocky consistency evoked the soil here in Hawley. In any case, the name stuck.

When I was describing the recipe to a friend, she suggested that one could just use a commercial Heath-bar-infused ice cream like Bart’s Coffee Heath Crunch instead of going to the trouble of crushing Heath bars to add to the ice-cream base. This feels like cheating to me.

In any case, I believe that Florette invented the Hawley Torte even before Steve Herrell first ground Heath bars up to add to ice cream in the 1970s. (Florette was always a food innovator; Herrell may have gotten the idea from her.) I thus find it only fitting to crush my own Heath bars, messy as the process can get.

To cheat in another way, one can purchase crushed-up Heath bars, called “bits o’ brickle,” in the baking section of some supermarkets. It’s not clear to me, however, that these contain enough chocolate, an essential ingredient for the torte.

When in doubt, crush, I say.

Florette originally made her torte with ladyfingers. I can’t recall whether it was she or I who came up with the idea of using vanilla wafers instead. They are less elegant than the ladyfingers but easier to find.

Moreover, using them makes the torte into more of an ice-box cake; they are not dissimilar in consistency to the dear departed Famous Chocolate Wafers.

Ingredients:

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream (or coffee ice cream, or a mixture of the two)

1 11-ounce box vanilla wafers

6 to 8 1.4-ounce Heath bars

1 to 2 tablespoons Kahlua

Instructions:

First, soften the ice cream by leaving it out at room temperature. Depending on the weather, this can take up to an hour. Start checking the ice cream after 20 minutes and check it every 10 to 15 minutes after that. You want it soft but not melted.

Line the inside and sides of a 1 1/2-to 2-quart casserole dish with vanilla wafers. (I often get lazy and don’t go all the way up the sides.) Use parts of more wafers and wafer crumbs to fill in the holes between wafers on the bottom of the dish to establish a crust.

Crush the Heath bars inside their wrappers (to avoid a mess), using a rolling pin or (if you are desperate as I once was) a heavy shoe. A few large chunks are acceptable, but try to make a great many small ones. Remove the candy from the wrappers.

In a large bowl, combine the Heath-bar crumbs and the ice cream. Place this mixture inside the wafer crust. Then gently add the Kahlua. Don’t blend it into the ice cream too thoroughly; it should form swirls in the mixture. The Kahlua adds flavor; it also keeps the ice cream from freezing too solidly.

Sprinkle additional vanilla wafer crumbs on top of the torte, cover it, and place it in the freezer, where it should remain for at least 6 hours. Serves 10.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.