Doing Things the Easy Way

We celebrated my mom's birthday today. I baked the cake last night. I have a confession to make: I used a box mix. I did make some minor adjustments -- used a quarter cup of oil and half a cup of applesauce instead of half a cup of oil, and threw in some chocolate chips and a little extra cocoa -- but it was basically a box-mix cake.

Thing is, it was good enough. Everyone liked it. (We did of course make homemade frosting. That frosting you can buy at the store is just *nasty*.) There were no complaints. And it was easy.

OTOH, when I made banana cream pies last week, I made crust from a shortbread cookie recipe, and that was much better than the frozen crusts you can get. So I haven't gone over completely to the dark side yet, I guess.