As much as you might want to, sometimes there just isn't time to make frosting from scratch. If you're decorating a cake for a birthday or making cupcakes for you child's class, you don't have to settle for the muted flavor of canned chocolate frosting.

Although chocolate's sweet, pleasant taste may put a smile on your face, there are some disadvantages associated with eating this rich food. While you can eat any food in moderation, chocolate provides few nutritional benefits and has several nutritional disadvantages that may make it a poor choice for your diet.

Peppermint is a native plant of the United States, found in most of the lower 48 states. It has a long history of global folklore use for a diverse array of ailments, ranging from stomach disorders to colds to cancer.

The mind wanders, the sauce sizzles. Burnt sauces happen to every cook, from the experienced to the neophyte. The instinct may be to toss the sauce and start over, but this kitchen disaster can be overcome with a little ingenuity.

Soft, creamy puddings are an easy dessert to like, combining sweet, rich flavors with a cool and silky-soft texture. Most recipes use a starch thickener -- typically flour or cornstarch in the United States -- to bring the pudding to a suitable consistency.

Homemade chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven are a sweet treat, especially if the chocolate chips are soft and slightly melted.

While crunchy chips made from corn tortillas may seem like a healthy snack option, eating tortilla chips on a regular basis can cause negative side effects. Like other high-calorie, salty, fried foods, tortilla chips are best enjoyed in moderation.

If you have diabetes, your doctor may suggest limiting your intake of fat and refined sugars. Fat-free and sugar-free frozen yogurt can serve as an occasional treat, as long as you don’t overindulge. This snack food isn’t necessarily “bad” for you when compared to other snack foods.

In moderation, cheese is a nutritious food. Like the milk it's made from, cheese is rich in both calcium needed for strong bones and protein needed for muscle growth and maintenance. Cheese may have sleep-inducing qualities as well.

Although muscle growth requires you to consume a surplus of calories -- you need to eat more calories than you burn through exercise and other activities -- not all high-calorie foods are ideal for muscle growth.

Snack foods such as chips or crackers are expensive and can take a big bite out of your food budget. Especially frustrating is spending good money on a box of crackers or a bag of chips, only to discover that the crispy treats are stale after you've eaten only a few of them.

The hardest part of making an apple pie is achieving a flaky pie crust with perfect proportions of fat and flour, but ready-made pastry crust gets the crust right every time. Rolled or folded pie crusts are usually sold in packs of two so you have a bottom crust for the pie plate and a top crust to cover the apples.