The Lesson:  Use what you have. 

I found a huge sale on cake mixes for $.49 each about 9 months ago and I bough a LOT.  Normally we don’t consider cake mixes food, but when I need to take a treat to a gathering, it can make it a lot less stressful.   I’ve tried making cake from scratch and I’ve never gotten it to turn out well.  (Unless it is fruit filled cake, like fresh apple cake, carrot or zucchini cake–Yum!)

Cake mixes make cake (duh), but they also make cookies, brownies, sweet pie crust, and fruit crisp topping. 

This summer has been especially busy for us and I often feel overwhelmed.  I needed a quick snack to take to our monthly family worship gathering and thought about what I had on hand:  cake mix, fresh strawberries that really needed to be used, a tiny amount of powdered sugar, strawberry jello, and an open brick of cream cheese needing to be used.  Strawberry pizza was the natural choice!  Since I was using what I had on hand, I didn’t follow a recipe.  Here’s what I did:

Strawberry Pizza:

Crust:  1 cake mix, 1 stick butter melted, 1 egg.  Mix all together in an electric mixer and roll onto a pizza pan.  Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes. Cool completely

Frosting:  8 oz cream cheese (can use lowfat or non-fat) 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla.  Whip together and spread over crust.

Top with sliced strawberries.  You can glaze with strawberry jello mixed with 1/2 cup warm water until it dissolves.  But it was almost too sweet that way.  It would have been better plain or with whipped cream.