Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada day everybody! For those of you who don't know, it is very rare to find desserts that are tailored to this specific holiday. I'm not exactly sure why, perhaps it's the daunting task of creating an edible version of our national symbol the maple leaf or creating those deep tones of beautiful red that is in our flag.

I seem to recall an ice cream company that wanted to create a seasonal ice cream in the traditional rectangular cardboardish box, that when opened would show the Canadian flag. The idea was to "pipe" the icecream in as they do with many other shapes of ice cream. This proved to be far more difficult than was originally expected since when ice cream is initially packaged it is still in it's "soft serve" state. Thus, the red ice cream maple leaf melded to the white ice cream that surrounded it creating a half-way look between Canada and Japan's flag.

Well... last year, Kraft came out with a most fantastic Canada Day cake, and I tell you this cake has everything in it! There's wonderfully red strawberries that make a beautiful maple leaf shape sitting on top of Cool Whip (who doesn't love Cool Whip?), and a Jell-O middle (there's always room for Jell-O) and of course the cake, pound cake that is. I'm sure it'll be a hit at any gathering, and if you're not Canadian, or the maple leaf isn't your thing you can always alter the pattern on the top of the cake to look like something else, a heart perhaps?