Adina's Strawberry-Lemon Layer Dessert

Adina helped me make a dessert yesterday.  It's really delicious.  It's actually my friend, Lindsay's recipe, that she made for us last year when she brought us supper right after Adina was born.  It was wonderful...I asked for the recipe, and now make it once in a while...it's really refreshing!

I wrote that it's Adina's recipe because Clarence was still napping, she'd woken up, and wanted to help.  I pulled a chair up next to the counter (I love that she's old enough to do that now!), and let her hold the ingredients until I put them together.  So, my end result was a dessert with a lot of Adina's finger flavoring (because she touched everything as I made it...she stirred the graham crackers in the crust with her fingers; she dunked her whole hand in the bowl with the pudding and licked it and then repeated over and over; and she ate the cream cheese by the finger-full before I started mixing it. 

She was a huge help! Actually I loved having her with me...since the dessert was only for us, it didn't matter that her fingers touched every ingredient.


Strawberry-Lemon Layer Dessert

Crust:
11 graham crackers, crushed
1/2 c. sugar
1 stick melted butter

Put in a 9x13 pan, mix with a fork, and spread out. 

Filling 1:
2 (8oz.) bricks cream cheese, softened
1/4 c. milk
1/4 c. sugar

Cream cream cheese until smooth; add milk and sugar.  Spread over the graham cracker crust.  *You may need to use your fingers to just pat it on because otherwise it pulls the crust up.  Trust me, I've made it a couple times and the fingers seem to work best!

Filling 2:
2 3oz. packages instant lemon pudding
3 cups cold milk

Mix pudding and milk in a bowl (I usually do this before the cream cheese filling so that the pudding has a chance to set up a little.) Spread over cream cheese mixture.

Topping:
1 carton cool whip, thawed
1-2 c. strawberries (frozen or fresh and depending on how many you want)

Mix together and spread over the lemon pudding layer.  *I use the big carton of cool whip (12 oz. I think) because I like the topping thicker.  I also use a lot of strawberries...they really add to the dessert.  Refrigerate (or eat right away) for a while.  Store in the fridge. 

*If you want to make this into two desserts, use two pie plates.  That's what Lindsay did when she brought us supper last year.  She gave us a pie plate of it and kept a pie plate of it for herself.  That works well, too!
And, obviously, if you only wanted to make a smaller portion of this dessert, you could half it...it would work fine to do that!


Enjoy!!!