The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Food Section, Let’s Eat, features today a dessert using the cream whipper, which is so much fun! Fill the canister with heavy cream (or in their recipe, sweetened raspberry puree mixed with cream), then use a N2O charger, and — voila — perfect whipped cream comes out in luscious swirls.

At parties, I love to serve dessert and pass the whipped cream canister around for the guests to dollop their own fluff. Everyone has fun squirting the cream — especially once when the 85-year-old woman missed her dessert plate and sprayed the cream on the tie of the 90-year-old man across the table. What an ice-breaker — no, cream-breaker!

Kitchen Conservatory sells the cream whipper in two sizes (pint and half-pint — but buy the pint, which is so much more useful for almost the same price) and also packages of the N2O chargers.