My friends, there’s a time and a place for everything!

Sometimes I go all Thomas Keller and sometimes I go all Sandra Lee. If I’m making French macarons, there are no shortcuts or semi anything. I make those delicate, little cookies from scratch. When I make cake pop balls, I use cake mix for my dough. No need to make a cake from scratch when I’m just going to crumble it and dip it into candy coating.

Let me tell you about my latest semi-homemade adventure…

This is my BBF Erica. We met back in the day when we didn’t have kids, we worked long hours and we weren’t so domesticated hahahaha. Through the years, we’ve shared with each other our ups and down of parenting, marriage, careers and more. And now with Pinterest….. we share our love for pinning recipes LOL!

Anyway, she invited us over to her house for dinner last Friday. I’m a true believer in never showing up empty handed; therefore, I asked what could I bring? My friend’s response was “one of your world-famous desserts”. I cracked up at the “world famous” part and accepted the task.

I’ve been wanting to make Beyond Frosting‘s Strawberry Marshmallow Pie for a while and this would be a great opportunity to make it. Well, yeah. After going to Costco, cleaning my casa, chasing my kids around and prepping my house for showings…. I realized I had made the mistake of not reading the full recipe sooner. I now didn’t have the time to let the pie chill for 4 hours before heading out to our friends’. I was bummed!

Quickly, I began scrambling for a quick dessert recipe that I could make and take to dinner with us. I really didn’t want to turn on the oven either. It’s 110° outside and keeping this house cool is already costing us an arm and a leg. That’s when the light bulb turned on! I would take the cheesecake I had just purchased at Costco. I had bought it for our neighbor’s 4th of July party that ended up getting cancelled last minute.

Talk about good luck!!!

But OF COURSE, I wasn’t going to show up with a store-bought plain white cheesecake. I totally jazzed it up with marshmallows, chocolate and almonds. Can you see where I’m going with this??

I turned my lame cheesecake into a fancy Rocky Road Cheesecake in just 5 minutes!

   

So here’s how the next 5 minutes went down….

Melt the chocolate. Cover top of cheesecake with Jet-Puffed Mini Marshmallows.

Roast the marshmallows with hand torch.

Drizzle the melted chocolate all over the top of the marshmallows.

Yummy!!!

Made sure to drizzle all the way to the edges.

Add lots and lots of chocolate 🙂

Sprinkle on the almonds.

BOOM! Just like that I had turned my $12.99 Costco cheesecake into a The Cheesecake Factory look-alike one. No one would know my cheating secret!!

Except….. I left it in the same container it came in and confessed to my friend. I’d say she forgave me LOL