A great recipe!

When my children were really young, we lived for a couple of years in Grantsville, Utah. There are some really super people there, and we enjoyed our time there. One of the ladies in our ward (LDS church group) had a daughter coming home from her mission, and I volunteered to help her at the after-report reception. We don't do these any more, because they became a we-can-do-it-better-than-you kind of thing. but this was back in the day. Anyway, she served this wonderful dessert called Trifle, which I had never heard of. She got the recipe while she and her husband and family were in England, and she was more than willing to share it with me.

It's a beautiful, easy dessert. For my family, who eats this like it's going out of style, I use two small boxes of instant vanilla pudding, one yellow cake mix, two baskets of strawberries, 3-4 bananas, 1 pkg. frozen raspberries (or fresh, if you have them), 1 box Danish Dessert or 1 tub of strawberry glaze for making pies, and one large tub Cool Whip. Start by baking the cake in a 9x13 pan and letting it cool. While the cake is cooling, pick the tops from the strawberries and slice them. Add just about 1/4 cup sugar. Don't add too much because it will make the filling too juicy. Slice the bananas and add them, with the raspberries, to the strawberries. If you have Danish Desert, make it according to the instructions on the package. If you have strawberry glaze, us it as is. Add the glaze to the fruit and stir well.

 Last of all, make the pudding according to the directions on the package. Now break the cake up into small crumbles and start layering the ingredients in a straight-sided glass bowl, or Trifle dish. (They really do make dishes meant for trifle!)

Start with a little bit of the fruit mixture, just enough to moisten the bottom. Now your layers go like this: cake, fruit mixture, pudding and Cool Whip. The fruit should always go on top of the cake so that the juice will soak into it and not juice up the pudding. (My bottom layer is backwards, but the top layer is right :0 ) My trifle dish has disappeared, so I had to use more than one dish.

When you get it all layered, it will look really beautiful! Serve it to your family and listen to the compliments roll in. It makes a splash at parties and potlucks, too!  I hope you will try this recipe and let me know what you think. I like to have this for my birthday instead of a cake.

Until next time, think about this: Birthdays are good for you - the more you have, the longer you live! Happy summer and good eating!