I was in the middle of making this dessert this afternoon when it occurred to me to take a picture of it and post the recipe, a la Barb. 🙂

Four Layer Dessert

2/3 cup butter or margarine
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
3 tablespoons sugar
8-ounce container whipped topping
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened
1 cup powdered sugar
3 cups milk
2 3-ounce packages any instant pudding mix

Turn oven to 350 degrees. Place margarine in a 9 x13 baking pan and place in oven until margarine is melted. Remove pan; add graham cracker crumbs and sugar; mix well, spread evenly over bottom of pan and bake for 7-8 minutes. Let cool.

Mix the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and 1 cup of the whipped topping and spread mixture evenly over the graham cracker crust. Mix the instant pudding mixes and milk and spread over the filling. At this point you can refrigerate the dessert for 15 minutes, if you’d like, so it congeals a bit. Spread the remaining whipped topping over the top and refrigerate 2 hours.

You can make up the graham cracker mixture in a separate bowl and then put it in the pan: I’d just rather do all of that in the same place.

We usually make this with chocolate pudding, and, if you’d like, you can take a Hershey’s candy bar and vegetable peeler and shave little chocolate curls over the whipped topping. But another variation we like involves fruit. I use banana pudding and, in between the cream cheese layer and pudding layer, I add strawberries cut into bite-sized pieces and banana slices (in which case I guess it should be called Five Layer Dessert). Here is a picture of the layer with the fruit. I didn’t take a picture of the completed dessert because it just would have looked like whipped topping.

Our church has “family camp” on Wednesday nights during the summer with different men in the church or guests speaking on some topic relating to the family, then we have a fellowship afterward, usually with some theme involved. Tonight it is supposed to be “Fruit Filled Desserts.” I don’t make pies very well. They taste ok, but they’re not very “pretty.” So I went with this dessert instead.

You may notice the little bowl above the pan. Well….whenever I make this, I always want some right then. There is always a chance that it might be gone before I get to it at the fellowship, right? And if I take a scoop out of the finished product, it will be really obvious (though I have thought of doing so and leaving a little paper that says “Inspected by #12” in the empty spot. 🙂 ). So today I thought of putting a spoonful of each layer in a different bowl for me to…ah….taste-test. 🙂 😳