Strawberry Pretzel Dessert

Above picture is courtesy of Taste of Home's website

One of the many desserts planned for this Thanksgiving dinner was strawberry pretzel dessert. I found a recipe I liked at Taste of Home's website. Click here to see the complete recipe. Warning: This dessert is labor and time consuming. I thought I could throw this together real quick, put it in the fridge and be done with it. But it actually took at least 3 hours to get this to the point where I could leave it in the fridge for the night.

The first thing was to make the crust. I used two cups of crushed pretzels, one cup of sugar and one stick of butter. Taste of Home's recipe was designed to cut out some of the calories but I did not have the Splenda and I needed to use more butter than was called for because my crust was too dry and I knew it would not set up correctly.

After the crust was baked and had cooled, the next layer was a mixture of cream cheese, sugar and cool whip. Then it had to go back in the fridge to set up a little longer.

The pineapple and strawberries had to be drained....................

The pineapple juice was brought to a boil on the stove and the two packages of strawberry jello was then added to that.


Then the juice from the strawberries along with some water was added and it had to go back into the fridge to set half way......

I like to keep my laptop on the kitchen counter and have the recipe pulled up on whatever website I'm using instead of referring to a cookbook or a printout of the recipe......

After the jello set half way then the pineapple and strawberries could be "folded" into it......

and then it was ready to spread over the bottom two layers...

After I got it all put together, I covered it with saran wrap and it went in the fridge until dessert time after Thanksgiving dinner................

or rather, that was the plan. When I took it out of the fridge this morning to make sure the jello had set up properly............it was way too tempting, so I had to have a serving of it for breakfast!!!

Did the jello set up after I struggled with it so much last night?

No, it did not. It all fell apart and did not set up firm and pretty as in Taste of Home's picture.

But it was delicious and maybe I can be self controlled enough to not get into again before Thanksgiving dinner feast time gets here!

Click here to get to the complete recipe.