Baking Frenzy

Although the summer term for the class I was TAing is technically over, I am still trying to wrap up the class. In addition to the never ending stream of paperwork that seems to be inherent to teaching, I have also been baking desserts for the lunch that my students and I are taking to their cooperating teachers tomorrow. I have made chocolate marble chess bars, blueberry bars (from a recipe I got from the addictive The Smitten Kitchen website) and chocolate chip cookie bars. While I enjoy baking, my tiny apartment and its archaic and evil oven make this task much more difficult than it has any right to be. With some careful watching, the blueberry bars came out marvelously, but the chocolate marble chess bars burned on the bottom. Luckily, the worst part of the chess bars' crust peeled off, allowing me to salvage that batch. I'm waiting with bated breath to see if the chocolate chip cookie bars turned out okay; they are cooling on the counter, so I can't check their bottoms yet.

While I've had fun with my weekend baking frenzy, I've managed to spend an absurd amount of money on ingredients, dirty all of my dishes several times, burn myself once, and cut myself while grating lemon zest (it was as much as it sounds). All of this has made me miss having a large kitchen, a dishwasher, and an oven that has more settings than "off" and "incinerate." Oh well - such are the joys of graduate student life!