My son’s nursery school, which we love for its sense of community, divides up snack time duty among the parents.

Each day, a different child/parent is responsible for bringing a snack suitable for all the toddlers in the class. There are some severe nut allergies, so most store-bought baked goods are out of the question, as are a lot of crackers and other packaged snacks.

What’s a busy mom to do? Bake something healthy – using ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen.

Our snack day was yesterday. At six o’clock the night before, I had not yet figured out what to do for snack day…and I had an infant to get fed and to bed and a toddler to entertain and get to bed. My husband was out, so I couldn’t really leave the house to run to the store once all the kiddos were down. I certainly didn’t want to do a mad dash at 7am on snack day to try to find something suitable either. So, I cracked what has become one of the most used cookbooks in our house, Tamra Davis’ make me something good to eat, and found the perfect recipe: apple cake. The best part – it didn’t take any fancy ingredients, I had all the ingredients I needed already on hand: apples, applesauce, butter, flour, sugar, 1 egg, cinnamon, and salt. The recipe calls for nuts – but as we know I wouldn’t be needing those.

The batter took a whopping 15 minutes to whip up (most of that spent chopping up 3 apples – if you have knife skills, it’ll take you even less time). Then I baked it for about 35 minutes and was done. The best part: the cake pan came back empty from school. The word on the playground was it was ‘dahwishus!’