This post was born when I looked at the Iced Vo-Vo I was about to eat and thought, “You know what would make this biscuit better? If it was larger, and less dry, and had more jam. Or if it was a cake.”
Then I googled “iced vo-vo cake” and the rest is history.
It turns out there are a lot of takes on the Iced Vo-Vo in cake form.
- A butter cake with pink icing
- Delicious calls this an “Iced Vo-Vo-inspired ice cream cake”, but it’s actually a gluten-free cake with layers of gelato, marscapone and jam.
- Taste gave us the Iced Vo-Vo tart. Spoilers: the crust is crushed Iced Vo-Vos.
- But they also give us Iced Vo-Vo cheesecake pops. Now, the Cake Discourse (is cheesecake a cake, a pie, a tart, or something else?) is the province of Galactic Suburbia, and also I don’t like cheesecake, but I’m glad this exists.
- Steph’s excellent friends Cindy and Michael made her a vegan Iced Vo-Vo cake last year, shaped like a giant Iced Vo-Vo.
Speaking of Galactic Suburbia, I hadn’t actually heard of the Chocolate Ripple Cake until Tansy mentioned it a couple of months ago, but it’s apparently a classic Australian no-bake cake, where you layer Chocolate Ripple biscuits with cream, vanilla and caster sugar, then stick it in the fridge and let the cream soften up the biscuits.
My lactose and gluten-intolerant stomach is churning at the thought — with regret that I didn’t eat this back when I could have digested it.
Anyway, here’s a slightly fancy twist on the classic Chocolate Ripple Cake: MORE CHOCOLATE, and also honeycomb, and also Maltesers.
And here’s a vegan Chocolate Ripple Cake, because Steph and all of her vegan friends are obsessed with Chocolate Ripple Cake, especially the version where you pour booze into it.
Need some actual booze to wash all these cakes down? How about a Golden Gaytime cocktail?
Need something non-boozey to wash it all down? What about a Lamington Freakshake? Or a Cherry Ripe Freakshake?
Is it all too much gluten? How about macarons with Fruit Tingles, Wizz Fizz and popping candy? Or a vegan and gluten-free deconstructed soft-serve baklava?
Want some more variety? What about all of these ideas for fairy bread reimagining. Steph would definitely like a fairy bread cake, please note for future events.
Finally, what better way to express your blind patriotism than via a remixed Anzac biscuit? Melbourne venue Blind Frankie, in Fitzroy (of course) honours our fallen by using the protected “Anzac” label on both a jaffle and a cocktail. The perfect post-dawn service breakfast — unless, of course, you are a woman of colour and/or an ABC employee, in which case The Australian is here to ensure that anything you say or do on 25 April will be offensive and wrong.
Please link us to any excellent reimagined classic hot takes in the comments.
no-award.net 
We do the bogan no-kids chocolate ripple cake: dip the biscuits in Baileys before covering in cream.
HELLO YES this post is relevant to my interests, and now I want iced vo-vos in all forms even though I am pretty sure we have no packaged equivalent in this country. Maybe I’ll ask the spouse to check the fancy gourmet imports store near his office. (We do have an equivalent of the Chocolate Ripple Cake made with slightly different chocolate biscuits; it’s delicious.)
Possibly relevant recipes I have not yet tried but will eventually: Cadbury creme filled doughnuts and Cadbury creme egg cookies.
Vaguely relevant recipe, in that it relates to translating a cocktail into cake form, and also, I have made it and it’s very good: gin and tonic cake.
Iced Vo-Vos are actually one of those biscuits that are always a bit disappointing — hard where they should be soft, and tasteless where they should be sweet.
I’d like to say they were better when I was a kid, but… *footage not found*
I’m chuffed that our mega-Vovo scores a mention in this post.
I don’t think it’s quite so intentional, but I recently ate a coconut and jaggary dessert dosa that had the beautiful caramel chewiness of an ANZAC biscuit.