Desserts 4 Today

Simple and quick! These sweet treats are especially great for Valentines Day!

1. Celebration Cake -- EASY, EASY! Looks beautiful and NO cooking at all!

Sweetmeat

You'll need: 1 prepared angel food cake, 1 can pie filling and 1 tub prepared cream cheese frosting. Place cake on a cake plate. Frost it! Pour the pie filling in the hole in the middle of the cake. Serve slices of the cake topped with some pie filling. Decorate with added coconut, nuts, or candies! Cherry pie filling is perfect for Valentines Day!

2. Love Cakes -- Extremely beautiful, yet simple to make!

NO cooking! You'll need 1 prepared pound cake, 1 tub prepared vanilla frosting, some red food coloring, 1 tube chocolate decorative frosting with a plain tip for writing, 1 (14 oz) bag M&M'S Milk Chocolate Candies for Valentine's Day.

Line a cookie sheet with waxed paper and top with a wire cooling rack; set aside. Cut pound cake into 1-inch thick slices. Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, cut out cake using cookie cutter. Place the heart-shaped cake pieces

on the wire cooling rack. Spoon 1/4 cup of vanilla frosting into a zipper-seal plastic bag and set aside. Tint the remaining frosting to a light shade of pink using food color and spoon it into a glass-measuring cup. Heat the pink frosting in the microwave for 5 to 10 seconds, or until it can be poured. DO NOT OVERHEAT. Pour the pink frosting over the heart-shaped cake pieces, covering the tops and the sides. Reuse the drippings and reheat, if necessary.

Refrigerate until set (about 30 minutes). Fill a zipper-seal plastic bag with frosting, then snip a tiny corner of the bag and use it to pipe lacy designs on the tops and sides of the heart-shaped cake pieces. Add candies to make different designs, then pipe messages on the tops with the decorative chocolate frosting.

3. Flavorageous Crispy Treats -- Kid Tested!

5 T butter or margarine

9 C miniature marshmallows (16 oz)

1 envelope Kool-Aid, any flavor**

9 C Crispy rice cereal

Grease a 10x15x1" pan. Melt butter; about 45 seconds on high in the microwave. Add marshmallows; toss to coat with butter. Microwave on high 2 1/2 minutes or until smooth; stirring every minute. Stir in drink mix. Immediately add cereal, mix lightly until well coated. Using greased spatula or wax paper, press into prepared pan. Cool. Cut into desired shapes with cookie cutters or cut into squares.

**Favorite Kool-Aid Flavors are Fruit Punch and Cherry

Leslie Sausage lives with her husband in rural Texas. She is the mom of four grown children, a freelance writer and an elementary school teacher! She is the author of several eBooks. For creative, practical and fun ideas please visit her web site at http://www.heart4home.net

Everyone loves a good dessert. Decadent chocolates, luscious fruits, supreme custards. However, making such succulent desserts can be a daunting task to the novice baker. Luckily for the cooking-impaired, all is not lost. There are a great number of simple dessert recipes that not only produce beautiful and delicious desserts but are approachable even for those who may not be as familiar with their oven.

The key is to look for the right kind of recipes. For these purposes, it is not so much important to consider the end product, but the cooking skill required to arrive there. So, when considering what recipe to use, keep the following guidelines in mind.

Dessert

1. Ingredients. When picking a recipe, first look at the list of ingredients needed to complete the recipe. Some recipes have over ten required ingredients while others may only have five or six. Usually, the more ingredients used in a recipe, the more complex the recipe is to make. Additionally, recipes with long lists of ingredients will likely include some lesser known and more rarely used ingredients, which might require an extra trip to the store. Recipes with fewer ingredients are often easier to make because they have less steps to complete, though often the end result is just as delicious.

2. Preparation time. For inexperienced cooks, it might be advisable to look at how long it will take to complete the recipe. A large amount of prep time not only cuts into a busy day more, but it also suggests that a recipe is more complicated and therefore have more possibility for error. The preparation of a dessert is critical; one misstep can spell disaster for the end result. So keeping the preparation time to a minimum reduces that risk. It is important to remember that even simple dessert recipes can be the perfect treat.

3. Baking terminology. Look carefully at each step of the recipe. If there are words and terms that are unfamiliar, then this recipe may not be simple enough to consider. There are various methods of preparing foods that unskilled cooks may not be familiar with. Unless you are willing to put in extra time to research just what these terms mean, it may be wise to select a recipe with more basic steps.

4. Mixes. While making a dessert from scratch can be a gratifying experience, today there are a multitude of baking mixes that produce food that is just as yummy. The baking aisle of any supermarket will have a wide variety of mixes for cakes and brownies or even cookies and pies. To truly simplify baking a good dessert, try a mix. Most mixes will even have small recipes on the box to enhance the mix and create a more tasty treat.

Whatever the occasion, be it a dinner party or just a snack for yourself, it is easy to find simple dessert recipes that will work for you.

Wendy Pan is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about simple dessert recipes [http://dessertrecipessite.info/simple-dessert-recipes-tips-for-finding-the-right-recipe], please visit Dessert Recipes Site [http://dessertrecipessite.info] for current articles and discussions.