14 Vintage No-Bake Desserts That Taste Just As Good Today

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No-bake desserts were once all the rage, particularly in the mid-20th century when convenience was highly sought after in the kitchen. It's easy to see why these now retro desserts were so popular in their heyday. They were easy to make, affordable, and didn't require much more than a fridge and a few pantry items. In addition, they featured fun ingredients like Jell-O, canned fruit, whipped cream, and instant pudding. They weren't necessarily fancy, but still managed to win fans.

While there are many old school desserts that have fallen out of fashion, some vintage no-bake recipes are quietly making a comeback. From grasshopper pie to scotcheroos and chocolate mousse, we're starting to see retro no-bake desserts popping up at all sorts of gatherings. Maybe it's the nostalgia, or perhaps it's the appeal of not having to use an oven. Then again, it could be that they're just downright tasty. If you're looking to add some retro vibes to your next dinner party, these are 14 vintage no-bake desserts that are just as good now as they were back in the day.

If you grew up watching desserts get lit on fire at fancy restaurants, chances are it was cherries jubilee. This boozy fruit dessert was created by French chef Auguste Escoffier in honor of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which took place in 1897 and celebrated 60 years of her being on the throne. Escoffier knew that the queen loved cherries, so he created a dish of cherries poached in syrup, doused in alcohol, and served in timbales. The final touch was lighting them on fire to add a bit of flair.

Escoffier's original recipe featured fresh cherries poached in a simple syrup that was thickened with a bit of arrowroot. The alcohol he called for was Kirsch, a clear, cherry-flavored brandy. The recipe has evolved over the years, and now many people spoon the flambéed cherries over vanilla ice cream. You can use any type of cherries, including fresh (be sure to take the pits out), frozen, and canned or jarred cherries. Kirsch is ideal because it adds cherry notes, but if you can't find it, any type of brandy will do.

Cool, creamy, and minty, grasshopper pie is the perfect refreshing treat on a hot day. It gets its somewhat odd name from the grasshopper cocktail, a sweet concoction that consists of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream. Those are the main flavors of the pie, along with melted marshmallows and an Oreo cookie crust. It's often served with crumbled cookies, chocolate powder, or chocolate shavings on top and sometimes a dollop of whipped cream.

Grasshopper pie isn't particularly hard to pull off, which is one of its many appeals. You start by making a crust with pulverized Oreo cookies or chocolate wafers and butter. If you want to make things easier on yourself, you can also use a pre-made graham cracker pie crust. Then, you just whip up melted marshmallows with green crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream. For a non-boozy version, you can use green peppermint extract. The mixture gets poured into the crust, then you pop the pie in the fridge for a few hours to set.

If you've never had a scotcheroo, imagine a Rice Krispies Treat, but with sweet additions like chocolate, peanut butter, and butterscotch. The no-bake dessert first appeared in the 1960s, when Kellogg's printed the recipe on boxes of its Rice Krispies cereal. It was an instant hit thanks to its rich flavors and ultra-easy preparation. Scotcheroos are still wildly popular in the Midwest, where pans of the dessert often make appearances at church dinners, potlucks, and birthday parties.

The preparation for scotcheroos is pretty similar to Rice Krispies treats, except the cereal gets tossed in melted sugar and corn syrup instead of melted marshmallows. Peanut butter also goes into the mix. You then pour the base into a pan and refrigerate it until it sets. The final step is creating a topping made with melted semi-sweet chocolate and butterscotch morsels. This gets spread on top of the cereal mixture and the dessert is chilled again until it's firm enough to slice into squares. The result is a bar that's sweet, chewy, crispy, nutty, and chocolatey all at the same time.

It's hard to overstate how much home refrigeration changed the way people cooked. Iceboxes started to appear in American homes in the 1800s, and they were essentially cabinets lined with metal where you could place a large block of ice to keep items inside cool. This not only allowed people to keep food fresher for longer, but it also led to the invention of new dishes like the icebox cake. Refrigerators have come a long way since then, but icebox cakes still follow the same simple formula: layer, chill, and serve.

An icebox cake is a dessert that often contains cookies or wafers layered with whipped cream or condensed milk. The cake goes into the refrigerator and, as it chills, the cookies soften and meld with the cream. When you cut into it, you get a slice with the consistency of cake. The great thing about icebox cake — besides the fact that you don't have to use the oven — is that it's incredibly customizable. You can incorporate sliced fruit, spike it with some liqueur, add chocolate chips, or throw in pretty much anything you think will taste amazing.

Chocolate fondue may sound like a European classic, but it was actually born in New York. A restaurateur named Konrad Egli invented it with the Swiss National Tourist Office to promote Toblerone chocolate bars. He introduced the dish at his restaurant, Chalet Suisse in the mid-1960s, around the same time that cheese fondue garnered attention in America when it was introduced at the New York World's Fair. Cheese fondue would go on to become one of the most popular 1970s appetizers, and the chocolate version was just as much in vogue as an after-dinner treat.

Egli's original recipe for chocolate fondue included Toblerone bars melted with heavy cream and a splash of Kirsch. The traditional way to serve it is in a fondue pot over a small flame to keep the chocolate warm, alongside pieces of fruit or pound cake that you stick on a skewer then dip in the chocolate. You can also use an electric fondue pot like a Kusini Fondue Set or a Hamilton Beach Pot. 

This is another dessert where you can get creative by adding ingredients like cinnamon or coffee to give the chocolate a kick. You can also play around with different dipping items like pieces of donuts, marshmallows, or brownies.

Few dishes say "vintage" quite like a bowl of whipped topping, mini marshmallows, and canned fruit. Ambrosia salad is a fruit salad that usually consists of oranges, pineapple, shredded coconut, and some sort of creamy element like whipped cream, sour cream, or mayo. Some people also like to add marshmallows and nuts. While this old-school dessert may not be as popular today, ambrosia salad was once a symbol of luxury.

The origins of ambrosia salad can be traced back to the American South in the late 1800s. At that time, tropical fruits were hard to transport into and across the U.S., so dishes that contained ingredients like oranges, pineapple, and coconut were considered haute cuisine. Some of the earliest recipes for ambrosia salad called for just oranges with coconut and sugar. As transportation improved and canned foods became more readily available, the dish evolved to include all manner of fruits. In the 20th century, recipes began calling for creamy fillers and add-ins like marshmallows and gelatin powder. To this day, ambrosia salad remains a popular dish at potlucks and holiday celebrations in the South.

With just a few ingredients and no oven time, peanut butter cornflake cookies are one of those low-effort, high-reward desserts. All you need to make them is sugar, corn syrup, peanut butter, and cornflake cereal. First, simmer the sugar with the corn syrup until the sugar is dissolved, then mix in the peanut butter. Stir in the cornflakes until they're thoroughly coated, then drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a tray and you're done. Once they've cooled, you have a tasty sweet treat that's crunchy, chewy, and nutty.

Although it's not clear exactly when peanut butter cornflake cookies were invented, we can say that the snacks wouldn't exist without the ingenuity of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. The eccentric doctor was the president of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan and he was obsessed with plant-based diets and healthy living. In 1895, he created a nut butter that would be the inspiration for peanut butter as we know it today. The doctor also created cornflake cereal with his brother W.K. Kellogg, who would later go on to found the company that became Kellogg's, maker of Kellogg's Corn Flakes cereal.

It may be hard to believe it now, but Jell-O salads were once considered the height of sophistication. During medieval times, gelatin was made by extracting collagen from meat or fish. The process was arduous, so it was typically only the wealthy who had the time and kitchen staff to create elaborate gelatin dishes. That all changed in 1897 when a man named Pearle Wait created a fruit dessert with gelatin powder that he called Jell-O. The product took off in the early 20th century, and jiggly Jell-O salads began to take on all forms. One that still holds up today is Jell-O fluff.

At its most basic, Jell-O fluff just needs two ingredients: your preferred flavor of Jell-O powder and whipped cream or Cool Whip. Just mix the two together then chill it for a while and you'll have a creamy and colorful dessert. Some people use cottage cheese instead of the whipped cream. Others add sliced fruit and marshmallows, creating a dish that's similar to ambrosia salad. You can also create a Watergate salad with pistachio pudding mix, Cool Whip, chopped pistachios, and fruit. There's a lot of room for creativity with this cool, fluffy dessert.

If you want to impress dinner guests with a dessert that's dramatic but actually pretty easy to make, bananas foster is a good bet. The dish is a New Orleans classic that was born in the 1950s. At that time, bananas were making their way into the port city by the boatload from locales further south. Restaurateur Owen Brennan wanted to showcase a banana-based dish at his restaurant Brennan's, so his chef, Paul Blangé, concocted the sweet and sticky dish. Brennan named it after his friend Richard Foster, who was then the chairman of the New Orleans Crime Commission.

To make this deceptively simple dish, all you need is a frying pan and a few ingredients. Simmer some brown sugar and cinnamon in butter, then add sliced bananas and cook them until they start to brown. Then you add a good glug of rum and light the dish on fire. If you don't have rum, you can add a splash of whiskey to your bananas foster. As the alcohol cooks off, the bananas take on sweet, smoky, caramel notes. Bananas foster is traditionally served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

It's hard to beat the flavor combos of a classic chocolate éclair with its creamy vanilla-infused cream, rich chocolate, and buttery choux pastry. The only problem is that éclairs involve multiple steps and a certain level of expertise to make at home. That's where the no-bake chocolate éclair cake comes in. It offers all the same flavors, but with just five or so ingredients, all of which you can pick up at your local grocery store.

The chocolate éclair cake is a style of icebox cake that was majorly trending in the 1980s. To make it, start by whipping up some instant vanilla pudding mix with milk, then fold whipped cream into it. Layer some graham crackers in a pan or baking dish, then top them with the pudding mix, and repeat the layers until the pan is almost full. The final layer is chocolate frosting. After a few hours in the fridge, the graham crackers will soften and all the flavors will meld together to create a lighter, cooler, and creamier version of an éclair.

Long before it became a staple at American holiday tables, trifle was a centuries-old British dessert. It likely evolved from a dish called a "fool" that features fruit with whipped cream. In the 18th century, the dish evolved to include biscuits or sponge cake soaked in alcohol. It was a clever way to use up leftover ingredients that were going stale. Today, trifle takes on many forms, from simple layered dessert cups to elaborate bowls with multiple additions.

One of the key characteristics of a trifle is that it's served in a glass vessel so that you can see all the colorful layers. You can go simple with layers of graham crackers or sponge cake, whipped cream, and fresh berries. Then again, if you want to make something a bit more decadent, you can use rich custard or pudding and add baked goods like brownies or cookies. The sky's the limit when it comes to the ingredients. However, savory elements are probably best left out — just ask anyone who's seen that episode of "Friends" where Rachel mistakenly added ground beef to her Thanksgiving trifle.

Unless you're from the Midwest, you could be forgiven for thinking that puppy chow is something you'd feed to a furry friend. However, this sweet, salty, and crispy snack is very much beloved by humans of all ages. It also goes by the names Muddy Buddies and reindeer chow but the recipe is basically the same. Chex cereal gets tossed in a mixture of melted butter, semi-sweet chocolate, and peanut butter. When it's thoroughly coated, the sweet Chex mix is tossed in powdered sugar.

Interestingly, puppy chow does have a connection to dog food. Chex cereal was created by the Ralston Purina Company, which started out making animal feed in 1894 and branched out into human cereals, including Chex. In the 1950s, the company began printing recipes for Chex Mix on its cereal boxes. That savory snack made with Chex cereal, pretzels, and nuts coated in butter and garlic would go on to become a holiday classic. There's no definitive source for when the sweet version came to be, but we do know that puppy chow has been around since at least the 1960s.

Few vintage desserts are as decadent as chocolate mousse. A good version should be smooth and silky with rich notes of chocolate and cream. It requires a bit of effort to make, but it's well worth it for the payoff. The name comes from the French word "mousser," which means "to foam," and it refers to the way chocolate is melted with butter, stirred with egg yolks, then whisked with egg whites and cream to make it foamy. While rumors abound that the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec invented the dish and called it chocolate mayonnaise, the truth is chocolate mousse has been around since the 1700s.

The secret to a really great chocolate mousse is using top-notch chocolate with a high cocoa content. In addition, you need to melt the chocolate over low heat so that it doesn't burn or break. A double boiler will give you gentle heat to melt the chocolate evenly. From there, you mix the chocolate with your whipped cream, egg yolks, and whisked egg whites and chill it for a few hours. It's a great make-ahead dessert that's just as impressive now as it was decades ago.

Jell-O desserts ruled dinner tables and dessert spreads in the mid-20th century, but few were as eye-catching as the crown jewel cake. Also known as broken glass cake, this colorful creation features cubes of different flavored and colored Jell-O suspended in a creamy white mold. Cut into the cake and you have a kaleidoscope of jewel-colored pieces peeking out. It may look complicated to make, but it's actually pretty foolproof and oven-free to boot.

The recipe for crown jewel cake first appeared on Jell-O packages in the 1950s and it called for cherry, orange, and lime Jell-O. Of course, you can choose any flavors you like. The Jell-O is cooled until set, then cut into cubes. The main part of the cake is traditionally made with lemon Jell-O, sugar, and pineapple juice that's mixed together, chilled to thicken it a bit, then mixed with whipped cream. The final step is pouring the base and the Jell-O cubes into a cake pan lined with graham cracker crust, and chilling the cake. As an added touch, you can serve it with whipped cream on top.