A Yes and A Probably Not

The visit by Carole and David gave me the opportunity to cook a full meal. When you live alone, you cook what you need. The idea of a full meal, with dessert, rarely comes into my radar and I have a bazillion recipes for pies, bars, cookies, cakes, etc, that I've saved over the years which I would love to try. Their visit gave me a chance to try something quick and new in the dessert category.

The criteria was simple. It had to be quick to make. I'm spending an hour with meatloaf and cottage fries. I want a quick, tasty dessert. I stumbled across a recipe for microwave cherry cobbler. 15 minute prep time and 15 minute cooking time.

It went together quickly as it's a can of cherry pie filling topped with a streusel topping. That's brown sugar, oatmeal, butter and cinnamon. Into the microwave it went to cook for the 15 minutes stated in the recipe. The smell of cooking meatloaf and cooking cobbler was heavenly.

I wasn't all that impressed when I pulled it out of the microwave. Maybe it's the nature of this that the fruit filling will bubble up over the top. Maybe I didn't spread the topping out around the edges evenly. It smelled good, however, even if it didn't look quite right.

We didn't have dessert for several hours. I bought vanilla Oberweis ice cream as you just can't serve cobbler naked. Well, you can, but it's so much better with a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top. The streusel topping was hard to cut through to scoop out a serving. We had to let the ice cream melt a bit into the topping in order to cut through it. I looked back at the recipe and I did everything exactly as it said but the topping, while edible, was very hard. The only thing going for this recipe is that it's quick to prepare. I'm not going to save it as I can make any number of good cobblers the old-fashioned way, by preparing fresh fruit and baking it. It only makes 4 servings so I had cobbler for lunch the next week, minus the ice cream since I can't seem to keep ice cream solid in my lunch box. Warmed, it was okay.

I was going to make a snack cake for the kids to take with them on their trip back. That didn't get done. I baked that last night. This is an old standby that I used to make a lot of when Carole was in school.

It's called "Grape Applesauce Cake". It's got grape juice and applesauce in it. The batter is delicious and, once baked, it creates a moist, solid cake ideal for taking along on lunches. Cover warm cake with vanilla ice cream and, yeah, I should have made this instead.

I cut the 9x13 pan of cake into pieces, put the pieces in bags and tossed the bags into the freezer. I have cake for at least 2 weeks, although I will be out of ice cream in another week. The horror!

So, I won't make the microwave cobbler ever again and, if I'm craving cake, I just need to have grape juice and applesauce in the cupboard to whip this up.

Beverage:  Edinburgh's Finest tea

Deb