A "Fabulous" Finale for the Year

I've got some loose pages with "Betty Baker Tested" headings. I suspect they were from a calendar, as they have a hole in the top of the page-- but if it's a calendar, I don't have any indication of dates. In any case, the year is ending, so we will check out some of the recipes from the "Fabulous Finale Spread" page-- both because it's a finale and because a lot of people eat appetizers for New Year's Eve.

First up, of course, is the titular spread.

It starts out sounding rather cheesecake-esque, with all that cream cheese and sugar. But combine the fear of salmonella from the raw egg yolk and the tinny graininess of canned fruit cocktail, and this takes a turn for the no-thank-you. 

I am also not sure what "thin lemon-scroll-type cookies" might entail. My Google search suggests it might mean rolled-up tubular cookies (like Pirouettes), but it would be hard to spread anything on those-- much less big chunks of fruit cocktail! The picture clearly looks more like it's for a recipe for one of those desserts that can pass as salads in the Midwest than for a spread. 

Our appetizer platter could have a very last bite of Christmas with the Christmas Strawberries (no relation to The Cooking Calendar's Winter Strawberries). 

This offers yet another odd way to ingest cream cheese-- this time mixed with liver sausage, blue cheese, and onion (and mayo as needed), then shaped into "strawberries" before being rolled in "Fine bread crumbs, colored red" and given parsley leaves to help complete the strawberry look. I'm sure that dying bread crumbs red because you need to make fake strawberries is a fine way to end the old year...

To finish off the platter, here's a combination of dippers and dip: Meat Loaf Cubes with Applesauce Dip.

It's for those who want to eat cold meat loaf dipped in a mixture of seasoned applesauce and sour cream... A group that, unsurprisingly, would not include me. But hey-- at least these appetizers could make for a super-easy New Year's Eve party. Just make the recipes well ahead of time, shove everything in the fridge, set the food out on chilled platters as the guests arrive, and you're pretty much done! You probably won't even need to refill anything.

Plus, whatever you eat tomorrow is bound to be better than this! It's an easy way to make sure the new year really will be an improvement-- at least in a very limited way, but we will take what we can get.