Happy Easter friends! My girls, and I went to a super fun Easter celebration, egg hunt, and brunch yesterday. Someone made, and brought a strawberry jello salad that had a whipped topping, and pineapple chunks mixed in. It was delicious, and I happily ate two paper bowls full. I must confess, I have never made a jello salad before. I actually have never made jello before.

This is week number sixteen of me posting at least once every week. It is also week sixteen of Reddit’s 52 Weeks of Cooking challenge. The theme this week is 80′s Food. In honor of never having made jello, and because it is such an 80′s thing to do, I have decided to make a berry pretzel salad. It is scary how much I will fight the urge to place the 9×13 pan on my lap, and devour the entire jello salad with a soup spoon, watching old episodes of Seinfeld.

Thank goodness for my husband who has some self control, and an internal “when to stop eating” switch. He will gently take the spoon out of my hand, take the salad off my lap, remind me I am doing Week 2 Day 3 of Couch to 5k workout tomorrow morning at 6am, and help me to bed. He is a good man, that Dominic!

This is one of the best layers. When the salty pretzels, sugar and the butter is baked in the oven for about ten minutes, it hardens and forms the perfect crust for this “salad.”

I was reading a lot of these pretzel salad recipes, and some people used graham crackers, some used crushed vanilla cookies. Call me a purist, I am going with the pretzels.

What a mess I made trying to cream the sugar and cream cheese! It went all over the place. Next time I will use a spatula, and mush and stir it it before I take an electric mixer to it. Live and learn.

This is what it should look like after you fold in your whipped cream. I whipped my own cream by the way, so I could actually make something in this recipe.

Here is a close up of some strawberries we picked last Summer. I thought I would include one picture of something fresh and healthy. Hope you appreciate how thoughtful I am.

Needless to say, It is April and we have been out of our fresh, frozen berries for about a month now, so we are purchasing frozen berries from the store. We cannot wait til berry season.

Here are the frozen berries in the strawberry Jello. I stirred them into the jello, and waited for a couple of minutes and the Jello began to set up. It was magical.

I made the cream layer extra thick because I love that layer too.  Even though I waited an hour, I clearly did not wait long enough for everything to set before digging in. It looks like a jiggly, sticky, creamy, pudding-like mess, but tastes divine. Please make this a day ahead, and let it sit in the fridge overnight, for it to set up completely. In the Summertime, freeze individual bowls of this scrumptious dessert, and serve it to your hot family and friends. Everyone will ask you to make it again and again. Hooray for berry pretzel salad, and the 80′s.

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