The Beat Goes On

When I last left you, I was busy failing at making cheese despite multiple attempts with a friend from work. Fear not.  We did eventually get it right (fifth times a charm), making mozzarella that proved yummy enough sliced onto homemade pizza despite us not being able to master the round ball aspect of mozz making.

Just a few weeks later I spent some time with my kiddos in the kitchen, teaching them how to make a variety of fruit desserts.  Like all good Georgia peaches I grew up eating homemade cobblers, fried pies and ice cream. As a Girl Scout I later learned to make an excellent dump cake, which if you can get past the name, is an excellent  last minute recipe to add to the ol repertoire.  When it came time to teach the Mini Chefs, I figured a basic Peach Cobbler, a no fail Black Forest Dump Cake and a new (for me) Blueberry Buckle would set them up for a lifetime of easy desserts.

The Blueberry Buckle was attractive to me for one reason: streusel topping.  I LOVE streusel, truly I do. I'm not sure why butter and sugar become, in a fit of alchemy, an entirely new, sinful experience, but they certainly do.  And I love it.

Enter the Buckle, which turns out is essentially a cobbler with a streusel topping. Easy to make, delicious to taste, it proved a close runner-up among the kiddos taste buds which opted for the oh-so-refined Dump Cake  in droves.

Furthering the lesson on fruit desserts we then moved on to baked Banana Pudding, which despite being warm and covered in meringue, is still the yummiest way to make it.  By baking the bananas you get such a lovely caramely flavor missing from the time-saving one bowl, cold method.  The kids were game with the traditional method so we gave it a go, realizing too late that  beating meringue by hand is an exercise in torture. We did soldier on, managed to produce an excellent fluffy cloud to top the pudding and by some miracle rescued it from the oven mere seconds before "golden brown" could take the final baby step to "charcoal".

After adjusting to the warmth of the pudding, everyone agreed that this was a sweet they could get behind.  Proving their point they ate until the dish was clean and had to be restrained from resorting to licking it in search of further morsels.  Desserts? Check.