Fruit roll-ups, you know?
I mean the chewy snack that we used to call fruit leather, back before you could get it all plastic-packaged in every corner store.

It’s not only a great way to use up your past-its-prime fruit, but a wonderful energy-giving snack you can grab for a busy family on the go. And it’s surprisingly easy to make your own fruit leather.

My recipe calls for apples, because that’s usually what I’ve got, but you can easily do half-and-half pears and apples, or experiment with whatever other fruit you like.

Fruit Leather

½ cup sugar
½ cup honey
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp grated lemon peel
8 cups apples — peeled, cored and chopped

Preheat the oven to 150°F.

Combine all ingredients in a blender and puree until smooth.

Cover a large baking sheet with a piece of plastic wrap, and spread the fruit mixture on it.

Bake at 150°F for about 6 hours, with the pan on the top rack of the overn and with the oven door left partway open. The baking (drying) time will depend partly on how much juice is in the apples. You’ll know the fruit leather is ready when the surface doesn’t feel tacky to the touch and you can tear it into pieces.

Roll up the plastic wrap off the baking sheet with the fruit leather inside — I like to cut it into snack-sized strips first — and store it in an air-tight container.

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Into every woman’s life comes a need for a special sweet treat, something impressive you can whip up in a hurry. Like, when you suddenly learn that your in-laws are coming for tea, and they’ll be here in an hour!

You can make an emergency trip to the bakery (if there’s time, and if it’s open), or you can scrabble around in the kitchen cupboards and use what you have on hand to make an ordinary dessert a bit more fancy, or some combination of the two. Keeping just a couple of key ingredients on hand for domestic emergencies will make it that much easier.

Here are a few of our favourite sweets to put together quickly for company:

• Drizzle a bit of coffee-flavoured liqueur over a dollop of vanilla ice cream, and top it with a few curls of dark chocolate. Or try a splash of creme-de-menthe on lime sherbet, garnished with a citrus twist.
• Fancy up a basic spice cake (got a mix?) or some store-bought shortbread cookies with a simple caramel icing
• Serve up a trendy Dessert Soup in goblets or small pretty bowls. Blend 1 cup of fresh or frozen strawberries with 1 cup of plain yogurt, chill, and mix with 2 cups of ginger ale just before dishing it out.
• Chunks of store-bought pound cake are made special with Venetian Cream, also known as Zabaglione — an astonishingly easy and versatile Italian custard.
• Don’t underestimate the power of a nice cheese plate!
• Skip the dessert and serve a really good perked coffee (whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles are optional) with homemade chocolate-dipped spoons for stirring.

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