A great place you can check out for recipes is foodnetwork.com I just looked up "bridal shower" for you & they have recipes there & I bet you can find something really cool & easy to make as well as inexpensive. Betty

H1! My daughter got married a week ago and I was supposed to bake and decorate her wedding cake. Not only planning her wedding and reception,my husband was just diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer. I taking him for treatments 5 days a week,plus trying to tie up all the loose ends. My solution to my wedding cake problem was to have a local bakery bake the cake and I decorated it myself. Weeks ago, I candied tons of violets, violas and pansey's. The wedding was nature-inspired and there were bird nests and toparies everywhere. The 4 tier cake was on a piece of wood with bark around the bottom of it. It took me over 2 hours to decorate it with the bakery doing all of the baking and icing of the cake. I know with everything I had to do I could have never had the time to bake it and ice it myself. Don't forget your daughter's wedding reception is the largest party you will ever host! Good luck! Alanna from Pa

I read your post, got up from my computer, went to the kitchen and created a dessert I've never made before. Inspired by the cream cheese powdered sugar mixture and a few misc dessert cookbooks here is what I ended up with. 1 brick of softened cream cheese (had it out to make some banana bread but ran out of time to do what I planned with it). "some" 3/4 cup? maybe 1/2 cup? powder sugar made 1/2 recipe for banana cream pie filling. which was flour, sugar, milk, (which made the pudding) then added egg yolks, then some butter and vanilla cooled that, then added 3 sliced bananas. whipped up some whip cream (heavy whipping cream, with a tad bit of powder sugar mixed in. Then graham cracker crumbs, melted butter and brown sugar, mixed up. spread about 3/4 of that out on the bottom of a square baking pan, pressed down firm. Then spooned on a layer of the cream cheese, then the banana pudding mixture, then more crumbs, then more cream cheese mixture, toppped off with fresh whipped cream. Should turn out to be like a banana cheesecake :) I'll let you know in the morning how yummy it is.

shambo - Thanks for the link. The recipe looks interesting and as the author of the article spelled out, they certainly DID use the wrong pan size for that amount of dough (a common mistake in bread making that causes many failures). The shredding on the side of the loaf is a good example of too much dough in the wrong size pan. It didn't have enough rising time for that amount of dough before they tossed it in the oven. Glad they didn't submit that loaf for judging at the fair...(speaking from the perspective as a foods judge at fairs). All leaveners lighten the dough - whether it's from yeast or chemical leaveners, air, and steam from moisture in the dough - all of those are leaveners. As explained in "CookWise", "Yeast and chemical leaveners do not create new bubbles; they only enlarge air bubbles already existing in the dough." Perhaps a shot of chemical leavener is just the lift the bread needs to prevent it from being heavy. You'll also find waffle recipes that include both yeast and baking soda, but it's there for the lift that adds some lightness, not to neutralize the acidity. I'll have to do some more reading on the subject in my books... I find it interesting. -Grainlady