How Do Refrigerators Open Up Your Recipe Options in the Classroom?

If you have been following our mini-series on using recipes in the classroom, you may already be familiar with some of the ways you can create fun snacks with no special equipment or the ways a microwave can enhance your food preparation options. 

This time we want to take a closer look at refrigerators and the types of recipes they open up in the classroom. 

We will be referencing a number of our visual recipes here, as well as some types of recipes that could become visual recipes in the future. 

If you see a type of recipe that you’re interested in but isn’t yet a visual recipe we’d love to hear about it at hello@autismgrownup.com. 

One popular component that many no-bake recipes like to take advantage of is ingredients that can be whipped up into an airy structure then solidified in the fridge or freezer. 

Air whipped ingredients can be folded into other batters or made into their own layers. They can stand out as their own unique dessert or imitate another dessert. 

One example is folding cool whip into chocolate pudding to make dirt cups, which sets in the fridge and have a nice mousse-like texture to go with a cookie topping! 

Alternately, we use cool whip in this no-bake pumpkin pie recipe. The air in the cool whip allows for a lighter risen batter without baking but requires refrigeration to stay reasonably solid. 

Another popular structural no-bake recipe, albeit one that typically requires a hand mixer, is no-bake cheesecakes! 

Such recipes bypass the eggs that typically go into a baked cheesecake, instead whipping cream cheese together with sugar to create air bubbles and a lighter structure then poured on a graham cracker crust. Cheesecakes typically go in the fridge or freezer to set before they are served!

Of course, freezers can help you take some desserts a step further! Our juice pop visual recipe requires both a microwave and a freezer but we plan on releasing future versions that do not specifically require a microwave to work! 

Great examples of juice pops that don’t require microwaving can be juice-based, yogurt-based, or even carbonated drinks! In a similar vein of frozen desserts, there are plenty of options out there for no-churn ice cream! 

Some might rely on heating up the dairy, but there are also many ice cream recipes that rely at least partially on sweetened condensed milk and can make a tasty final product without the more traditional ice cream-making process. 

We mentioned no-bake cheesecakes occasionally going in the freezer, but there are also other types of icebox cakes that come in layered arrangements! Some classic and very fancy desserts have versions that are set in the freezer, including tiramisu. 

Many recipes that rely on the freezer are assembly based with options for customization, like ice cream sandwiches. 

Although our visual recipe includes steps for baking your own cookies, you can always replace oven-baked cookies with pre-baked ones!

One great way fridges can help with food preparation is by bringing some types of mixtures to a thicker consistency. 

One great example of this is in box mix pudding, which can be mixed up and thicken in the fridge until it’s ready to serve! 

If you are looking for a more meal-oriented food that is refrigerator focused, cold soups like gazpacho can involve a number of preparation steps without relying on a specific heating element. 

Don’t underestimate the value of being able to refrigerate some ingredients ahead of time either, especially when it comes to prepping special drinks like our Grinch punch.

We hope this post has inspired some new ideas for taking advantage of access to a refrigerator in classroom cooking! Next time we’ll take a look at what you can do if you have access to both a microwave and a refrigerator in the same space. 

In the meantime if you are interested in more visual recipes we’ll be waiting to hear from you at hello@autismgrownup.com.