Baking While Sleepy

Always problematic.

On Sunday, I really wanted to try out a recipe for Lemon Cheescake Squares that I saw on Martha Stewart. Check out the recipe – it looked so nice and straightforward. I’m sure Dopey could have pulled this one off, but not Sleepy. I crunched up the graham crackers and put them in a bowl to make the crust. Then I measured out 3/4 cup sugar. Now, if you look at the recipe, you’ll see there aren’t many ingredients to begin with, and this sugar clearly goes in with the filling. But no, not here in our kitchen. Hot Wheels was baking with me and he asked if he could mix the sugar in with the graham crackers and I said sure! In it went. 

Only then did I realize that we were only meant to put 2 tbsp sugar into the crust. Hmm. I’m really, really depression-era reluctant to waste any type of anything, so I put it all in a zip lock bag and figured I’d deal with it another day. Meantime I had enough material to make the crust, but I’d used up the last of the sugar. Neighbors to the rescue – Tom was dropping one of our daughter’s friends off at home, so I just called the house and asked if they might be so kind as to send 3/4 cup of sugar back with him. One problem solved.

There was another problem with these bars that I can’t chalk up to sleepiness, just inexperience. When I was buying the cream cheese I thought I’d be a tad more healthy and make one of them fat free. In the back of my mind I thought it might not whip up nicely, but what the heck. Well, no one seemed to mind all that much, but these really would have been better without the fat free cream cheese. It’s hard to make it behave.

The next day we had a couple of kids over to play. It was time to experiment with the graham cracker blend. We mixed up somewhat basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, only this time I was out of white flour (seeing any patterns here?) so we had to make do with wheat and barley flour – at this point I was just throwing things in there. (A little cocoa powder? Why not?) By some miracle they came out just fine.