Tom Harte

I have a confession to make.  For years I have been making a chocolate cake that everybody raves over. Once I took it to a committee meeting and one of the committee members said it was absolutely the best chocolate cake he had ever tasted.  Another time I took it to a party and people actually fought over the last slice.

Without fail, whenever I serve it, somebody asks for the recipe.  Well, the cake does contain some flavorful ingredients—Kahlua, sour cream, and almost a pound of chocolate.  But, and here’s the confession, it begins with a mix.

I enjoy baking cookies. It gives me great satisfaction to see how my family and friends enjoy the results of my efforts. But the truth is I really do it for the dough.

Let’s face it. It’s hard enough to keep your hands out of the cookie jar, but what’s really difficult is keeping your fingers out of the mixing bowl. In fact, the practice of eating raw cookie dough has become so popular that many people buy packaged cookie dough from the grocery store with absolutely no intention of ever baking it.

Perhaps you've seen the promo on the Weather Channel in which a meteorologist presents a lesson about tornadoes. He fills a blender container with yogurt and milk and blends it on progressively higher speeds. Finally, a student in the class blurts out, "So a tornado is mother nature's way of making a smoothie!" 

I don't know how apt the comparison is for meteorological purposes but one thing's for sure -- smoothies have become so popular, they're popping up as frequently as tornadoes in Kansas during May.