I always find something great over at Mom's Best Recipes, and this one is no exception. It's Peanut Butter Cookie Pie, from Shirley McNevich, and while I can't stand peanut butter in other desserts like ice cream, I will gladly eat it in cookie and/or pie form.

There's something very retro about this recipe, with its use of Cool Whip and Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Nestle's Chocolate Chips. And how many recipes do you find that actually include Nutter Butter cookies?

So this has peanut butter, eclairs, and cake in the title. Must be a diet food.

Actually, it's the Peanut Butter Eclair Cake, from Shirley McNevich over at Mom's Best Recipes. Besides peanut butter, it's made with Jello Instant Pudding, Cool Whip, and Honey-Maid Graham Crackers. I can picture my mom making this in the 60s or 70s, getting the recipe from a magazine.

I've had so much sugar and carbs the past two weeks that I think I'm turning into a giant dessert. I feel so blah and bloated. Even my teeth have this weird feel to them, as if they're screaming eat a bowl of soup, will ya?!

So I'm not going to participate in National Whipped Cream Day, but you can feel free to do so (unless you don't want to break that New Year's diet you're on - you're still on that, right?). Here's a quick recipe for whipped cream from AllRecipes, and these recipes have whipped cream on top of them: Cranberry Chocolate Cake with Rummy Whipped Cream, Pumpkin Cake with Whipped Cream and Pecan Praline, and Cherry Chocolate Shortcakes with Kirsch Whipped Cream. Of course, Cool Whip is always good in a pinch (I know, it's whipped "topping" not cream). By the way, whatever happened to chocolate flavored Cool Whip? I used to love that. I'd freeze it and make a dessert out of just that.

And for those of you who do "other" things with whipped cream, you should be ashamed of yourself.

My best friend from college sent a recipe around to a group of us recently that I think is just too good not to share. It is a slightly modern taken on a classic trifle (because they didn't have Cool Whip when trifles were first being constructed), that retains appealing traces of a 1950's ladies' luncheon. I can just imagine it being spooned out into footed glass bowls and garnished with a sprig of mint. It's also the type of dessert that if you ate the whole thing by yourself, you wouldn't need to worry, as it's mostly fruit, yogurt and air.

After I made my Jello pie, I wanted to do more Jello desserts - by which I mean that I had an extra package of Jello left over. I decided that I would try my hand at making a layered dessert because some of them just look too interesting to pass up and I've never actually attempted one before.

As it turns out, they're very easy to make. Gelatin doesn't set up at room temperature, so the layers-to-be can sit out while you wait for things to set up. The initial time involved is about 2 minutes, after which you can do household things (or blog) while you wait to pour on the next layer. 

I recently returned from a four day trip to Utah. My man, Matt, the children and I travel there about four times a year to visit the in-laws. Most of Matt's relatives are Mormon and they embrace just about everything that goes with that status.

Having grown up as a Catholic, these sojourns are always a fascinating cultural study for me. One of my favorite aspects of these studies involves food. Somebody is always cooking at a Mormon get together. There are always zillions of aunts, uncles, cousins and crawling babies and ordering out for pizza will just not suffice. Every function I have attended involves salads, both leafy and Jell-O,  white rolls, casseroles, meats, sauces, plenty of fruit juice and an array of desserts. In the past the kitchens have always intimidated me and I have stuck closely to the buffet line.  However, since I am now deeply entrenched in food research I decided to ask the various women, not be sexist but I have found the kitchens to contain only women at these gatherings, about their cooking secrets. I did not divulge to them that I would be blabbing their tips to the blogosphere, but I believe their knowledge just might benefit one or two readers. Following, in no particular order, are a few of the tidbits I learned this past weekend:

Looking through older cookbooks is always entertaining. There are almost always lots of interesting illustrations and the recipes themselves even have entertainment value. Betty Crocker’s New Dinner for Two cookbook has some good recipes and some ones whose popularity didn’t last beyond 1964.  The book is geared for anyone who is a "bride, a buisness girl, career wife, or a mother whose children are away from home," so all the recipes serve one or two, with a few large-scale ones thrown in for entertaining purposes. This is the first edition of the book, those subsequent versions were released into the 1980s.

Perfection Salad made me laugh out loud, with a combination of pickles, pimento, celery and cabbage, suspended in lemon-flavored gelatin and served with mayonnaise. I wasn’t tempted by that one. Peanut Crunch Slaw and Tuna and Chips Casserole were not likely to make my mouth water, either. Strawberry Shortcake, Ham and au Gratin Potatoes and Grapefruit and Avocado Salad all sounded fine, though, and I think that I might even be persuaded to try the Pineapple Marshmallow cream.