Springtastic Salad

It's gray today. It's hot, and the air is sticky, and thunder keeps rolling through but there's no rain. It's one of those days that just makes you want to sit in the air conditioning and not move much.

The perfect cure for the hot-sticky blues is something fresh, bright, and clean. Something sweet and tangy and fabulous. Something just loaded to the brim with all kinds of goodness that comes from the earth.

So on days like these, a salad just fits the bill.

But we can't have just any ol' salad, now can we? Nope. That just won't do. A salad should have texure, and not just texture but contrast! Hot and cold, sweet and spicy, creamy and crunchy, ooh baby, I'm gettin' all shivery. Sounds like one hell of a salad, yeah? Yeah!

Ruby Red Streusel Cake

For decades, people have been confusing breakfast with dessert.

Layers of cake, drowned in sugary syrup? Why not? Call 'em flapjacks.

More cake, glazed in icing and filled with jam? Of course! Everyone loves donuts!

Flaky pastry, filled with sweet cream cheese and fruit compote? Well heck, who could say no to danish?

Now normally, I'm definitely more of an eggs and yogurt kind of girl, but today, I'm jumping on the dessert-for-breakfast bandwagon. This coffee cake is brimming with all kinds of fabulous breakfasty fruits. So it counts, right? Serve it up with eggs, and you've got a perfectly balanced breakfast.

No? Well hey, balanced is overrated. I think Marie Antoinette would agree.

As for the title of today's post, the cake itself isn't ruby red, but all the juicy goodness inside of it is. Fresh plump strawberries, tart stalks of fresh rhubarb, and of course, ruby red grapefruit. Oh yes, grapefruit. See, I told you it was a breakfast cake. And with Mother's Day right around the corner, it'd make a lovely brunch dessert. Wrap them in pretty pink liners and you'd have some spectacular muffins for Mom.