Class, Bars, and a Wedding gift

Today is Friday. This means I have survived my first week of grad school! Yeah! It was a bit overwhelming, but also encouraging and made me excited about what is to come! The most overwhelming class was yesterday, during which we discussed for the entire 3 hours about interviewing. I left feeling, in a way, less prepared for my school interviews. Now I have huge lists of things I need to research and think about before my interviews come....and let's all pray that they will. I am very appreciative of this time though; I think I will feel very prepared for any interview question the panels may throw at me.

I spent some time baking again today. Once again Dan is going out of town, and I get to use it as an excuse to bake something for him to take with him. This time I chose to try 2 new recipes. One is from a friend, Nikki. She made these cookie bars for our friend Laura's wedding shower a few weeks ago and I couldn't keep my hands off of them! They were soft and chewy with a layer of caramel in the middle. Yum! So I asked her for the recipe and tried them out today, with a little tweaking. The second recipe was from the 2009 Pillsbury Cookbook, a wedding gift from a year ago. I love this cookbook because the recipes are very simple and use some of the greatest ingredients on Earth: Pillsbury ingredients! You know, things like biscuits, crescent rolls, cinnamon rolls, cookie dough....need I say more? Both bar recipes turned out well I think and should serve quite nicely when Dan and his friends have a serious sweet-tooth.

The Pillsbury Recipe, Mexican Brownie Crunch Bars, called for Cinnamon Toast Crunch as the bottom layer. I'm not sure what made these "Mexican" bars..maybe because they called for cinnamon to be added to the brownie batter.

Some of the ingredients I used today. Like I said in my first post, I really like to bake things from scratch, but both of these recipes had nice "shortcuts" in them, like using brownie/cookie packaged mixes. I also used caramel ice cream syrup instead of the real thing.

These are the bars soon after they came out of the oven. (Just ignore the missing corner pieces. As Milton always says, "I had to test them to make sure they were okay for everyone else." )

Both recipes turned out well, but I prefer the caramel cookie bars on the right; they were much easier and it would be easy to change the recipe to suit a variety of tastes.

Disclaimer: I know what you're thinking. "Gosh Maegan, you just keep making all this unhealthy food for Dan and yourself. It can't be good to consume all that oil and butter and chocolate all the time." Believe me, I usually don't make things like this. We try to eat pretty healthy during the week...if only I could Dan to like asparagus...so I don't feel too bad about having a sweet treat on the weekend. But I can't lie: I am an eater. I love to eat. I love food, especially dessert. Everyone in my family knows about the infamous home video of me describing my favorite foods...

...My name is Maegan Worley. My age is 5. And my favorite things to eat are chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits with gravy, rice...and my favorite things to drink are milk, chocolate milk, juice...

Just so you know, this is what I had for lunch today:

Tonight I am going to a wedding of some friends of mine that I met here in Louisville. When I was the intern at the U of L BCM I was in charge of overseeing small groups of leadership teams. One of my main responsibilities was leading the freshman ministry, FLT. My second year serving there, Jonathan and Jessi were my co-leaders for FLT and we became good friends. Jonathan met his fiance, Emily, through the BCM and they are getting married tonight. Congrats to them! As most of you know I love wrapping gifts! (Micah, your Christmas gifts will never be better than mine, haha) So I thought I would include a picture of their gift.

I made the flower in the middle from tissue paper. Don't be too impressed because it really is super easy! Just go to Youtube and search for 'tissue paper flowers' and you can find lots of how-to videos.