Cake, Pie, Pudding and...Dessert

I like something sweet at the end of a good meal.  I grew up calling this dessert. It meant the treat at the end of the meal. Desserts were pies, or crisps, or cakes; the items had names.  I noticed over the years though women of certain ages referring to various sweet concoctions as a "dessert" as in  "That was really good.  What was it called?  "Oh, that was a new cherry dessert."  I started associating using the term as a name, as opposed to the ending course of a meal, with matronly older women. These were women that had creatively mixed and adapted other recipes, and stuff in their cupboards and came out with a dessert in the end.  The more successful ones were jotted down and handed out at bridge club and sewing circles.

In putting together some food items to haul to the family lake cabin tomorrow, I did some scouting around on the Internet to find something different that I could make on Saturday, and would go well with the assortment of other food I had on hand, without making a special trip to the store.  I still had bits of frozen rhubarb and strawberries from last summer in the freezer and remembered someone posting something using both and a cake mix on a Face book page. 

I surfed and found this, strawberry rhubarb crumble recipe.  I had more strawberries and less rhubarb than called for, so improvised.  There is quite a bit of sugar, considering the cake mix, jello, and another cup of sugar, so not for those trying to tone down the sugar consumption. We will be working hard cleaning, weeding, mowing, and moving water crafts around so I am pushing the calorie count aside for tomorrow. Baking, it made the whole house smell delicious.  I baked in a 9" by 13" pan-not the bowl, and had to bake about eight minutes longer to get a little coloring on the top, but it looks pretty delicious. 

Pretty soon both girls wandered in, complimented me on the smell, and then asked what it was.  I honestly couldn't remember what it was called. I told them I found it on the Internet, the bridge club of my generation. After a moment of hemming and hawing I said, "It's a strawberry rhubarb dessert." I am now a woman of a certain age.