My friends had a Labor Day party today. My contribution to such parties is always a dessert. I had planned to make an angel food cake with all the egg whites I froze that were leftover from the ice cream I made earlier in the summer which just used the yolks. However, our air conditioning broke earlier in the week and I decided I wanted to make something that wouldn’t require me to turn on my oven. From somewhere in the recesses of my mind I thought about a chocolate eclair cake one of my relatives had made when I was a child. I googled it and pulled up lots of places with a recipe for the generic chocolate eclair cake, which is essentially made of graham crackers, vanilla pudding, cool whip, and chocolate frosting. That would have been super easy to make, but of course I would never bring a dessert made with a bunch of mixes like that. Instead I found this recipe that required me to make everything from scratch except the graham crackers. That would have been a little over the top. It tasted really good though and wasn’t that hard to make.

A couple notes on the recipe though especially for Americans since the recipe is from someone using English measurements. I made the custard recipe as listed (the corn flour is corn starch in case that confuses you). I just used a pint of heavy cream to make the whipped cream since our cream is not sold in 600 ml cartons. That worked out fine. I also made it in a 9 x 13 inch pan instead of an 8 x 8 inch pan. Note if you make it in a larger pan you will need to make more of the chocolate topping than the recipe calls for. There were enough graham crackers and cream to make 3 layers that way. The only thing that didn’t work out well for me was the chocolate topping. I tried to use a bag of dark chocolate chips, but stupidly forgot that whatever they use to make chocolate chips these days in order to help keep their form makes it so that they don’t ever really melt into a liquid. I used a knife to try and spread the chocolate as melted as it would get, which was about the consistency of a very thick frosting, onto the top layer of graham crackers. That didn’t work out too great as the graham crackers just slid around and cream just kept pushing from around the sides of them. I mostly got it spread around, but it certainly didn’t look pretty. It still tasted good though, so I guess that’s what counts.