Cookie Salad

Last night I thought I had a church function to attend.  I was supposed to bring both a salad and the recipe for it.  I wanted to bring a strawberry spinach salad, but the store was out of (affordable) spinach.  My second choice was cookie salad.  (Yum!)  I didn't like the fruit that the original recipe called for (Mandarin oranges and pineapple).  Not with delicious fudge striped cookies anyway.  In typical Angie fashion, I used the original recipe as a guideline and made up my own. 

Remember how I said I thought I had a function to go to?  Well....turns out I was a week early. Oops. My family ate my salad for dessert instead. Love all around for the cookie salad.

Cookie Salad
1 lg pkg vanilla pudding
2 cups milk
8 oz cool whip
1 apple, cut in chunks
1 banana, sliced
Strawberries, sliced
1 pkg fudge striped cookies

Mix pudding and milk. Let it set in the fridge for 5 minutes.  Fold in cool whip. Add fruit.  Just before serving crumble cookies and mix those in as well.

Enjoy!

Valentines Cake

Technically, it's Lyndsi's birthday cake, but it's definitely Valentine-themed. This was SO easy to do. The cake is just a white Pillsbury cake mix baked in two rounds and then stacked on top of each other. A filling would be great, but I opted for straight cake. I frosted with buttercream frosting tinted light pink. (Wilton has a great, easy recipe.) For the heart, I did a google image search for a heart outline, resized it in Word, and cut it out. Then I layed it on top of the frosted cake and used a toothpick to outline. I tinted what was left of my frosting a darker shade of pink (using the Wilton food colors) and frosted inside the heart.

All the brown piping and lettering is done with chocolate. That's right ladies-CHOCOLATE!! I saw this idea on Martha's website (I think) and had to try it. Just melt your melting chocolate pieces (found at the craft stores), put in a decorator bag and pipe away. It was really easy and actually seemed to work more smoothly than piping icing.

This would be a fun dessert for your loved ones come this Saturday. Enjoy!!