"What's For Dinner?"

What's for Dinner?

What's for Dessert?

Sometimes, Dessert IS Dinner at our house.

Especially in spring and summer, the abundance of delicious fresh fruit in California makes it easy to make excuses. Once, long ago, we came into a pile of fresh, ripe peaches and decided, just that once, that we would skip dinner and have peach cobbler and peach kuchen for dessert. With a little ice cream, we figured we'd covered most of the important food groups deliciously (and memorably).

In spring, consider strawberry shortcake with freshly whipped cream for brunch, or lunch, and/or dinner. It's been a tradition at our daughter's birthday parties in April starting when she was just a toddler.

Fall brings pumpkin pie, rich with eggs and cream, cozy with spice.

In winter, the kids love banana waffles spread with peanut butter and a little syrup.

Many people have asked me for a good recipe for a kids' birthday cake. I have two favorites: one a vanilla sponge cake, and the other a deep, not-too-sweet chocolate. Both are simple and fast to make, and lend themselves to variation: Cupcakes? Layer cake? Sheet cake?

You'll find the recipes in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook: Lazy Daisy Cake and Chocolate Buttermilk Cake. I've never, ever had a failure with these.

Here's what we did recently with a batch of each baked as mini-cupcakes.