I was watching YouTube and I saw this video recipe for a No-Bake Chocolate Biscuit Cake. And I was surprised to see that one of the ingredients for this so-called no-bake cake was a large quantity of cookies (or, as the British call them, biscuits). Well that kind of thing may fly in Britain but not here in America. If you buy muffins from Dunkin Donuts are they no-bake because you didn’t bake them personally? Of course not. A recipe that includes baked goods as ingredients is not a no-bake recipe.
A “no-bake recipe” means that the recipe’s instructions don’t call for baking to be done by the person preparing the recipe. The recipe may call for boiling, or torching, but it doesn’t call for the preparer to put the product into the oven to bake. I think you’re mixing the term up with “raw”.
Do you cook? A favorite homestyle cookie recipe, a staple of my late mother-in-law, is Chocolate No-Bake Cookies. Chocolate Coconut Oatmeal No Bake Cookies Recipe - She Wears Many Hats. They’re cooked (boiled), but not “baked” in an oven. Useful in summer when it’s too hot to turn on an oven.
I would call it a fridge cake, since that’s how I’ve seen such a recipe described here in the UK (it may be different in Ireland, where that video comes from).
Anyway, why fuss about the description? Chocolate, butter, biscuits…just eat, already…
the chocolate oatmeal peanut butter cookies my family’s made for over 40 years are boiled together and was described as “no bake” by the usda rationing cook book made back in 42
It also looks like something of an overly-sugary monstrosity to me. Chocolate, sweet biscuits AND golden syrup? Those poor deprived Irish dudes have clearly never encountered the simple pleasures of a nice chocolate ripple cake
It still counts as “no bake.” You would seriously no call it a “no bake pie” if your recipe asked for premade crust, which is usually baked? That’s not the normal usage of the term. The only argument here is whether the item in the OP is a cake or not.
I mean, if you look, there’s recipes for no bake bread pudding out there. Some of you guys are seriously going to say that’s not a no-bake recipe? Oh, come on. The whole point of designating a recipe as “no bake” is for the preparer’s sake. It is there to distinguish it from recipes that normally require an oven on the part of the preparer. The OP’s recipe is absolutely in the spirit of “no bake” dishes.
So nothing that uses any kind of crackers, bread, or cereal counts as no-bake, and if you stretch ‘baking’ to include ‘roasting’ (which is basically the same cooking process), then you can’t use peanut butter or chocolate and still call it no-bake. OP, do you just dislike the term ‘no-bake’ in general and wish people wouldn’t use it?
Seriously, though, I think it’s within the no-bake category. I think you can have a graham-cracker crust on some kind of unbaked pie or cake. I think some of them set without baking. Would that be different?