The Fruit-Computer Intersection

What happens when you combine fruit and a computer?  You get a sweet way to answer emails.  Or maybe just some cheesy humor and a blog post that is slightly unrelated.  :)

Anyway, this last week has been a culinary adventure.  My boyfriend came down to visit and I wanted to do something special, so I made cherry bars.  I had never tried this recipe before, but it was pretty good.  Essentially, you make a special cookie dough (which is quite rich, including 2 sticks of butter and 4 eggs, among other things).  Then you coat the bottom of a pan with it, spread a can of cherry pie filling on top, and dollop spoonfuls of dough on top of that.  Here's the lovely image:

Then, you bake it and the dough smooths out a bit, though it didn't provide the uniform coverage I was hoping for.  Once your bars are cool, you can frost them with a vanilla, milk, and powdered sugar mixture.  I thought that they were really good the first couple of days, but over time they start to get really soggy.  I also ran into trouble because I didn't have a 10 x 15 pan that was deep enough and used a 9 x 13.  Thus the middle was slightly gooey when the edges started to burn.  But, I would make this recipe again!  

It so looks good enough to eat.  :)  This weekend I also made (with some help), Sparkling Lemonade Cookies.  They are cake-like in texture and include lemonade concentrate in the dough, so the cookie is slightly lemon flavored.  When they come out of the oven, you brush them with lemonade concentrate and dust them with powdered or granulated sugar.  I thought both versions were nice, but I would definitely use more lemonade on top next time to be sure they had enough flavor.

In other news, I'm really enjoying the class I'm taking right now.  It's called "Computer-Based Information Tools" and teaches future librarians the basics they need to survive.  We just finished a unit on UNIX and how to communicate with servers that way.  Now we're learning HTML and XHTML, so that we can build webpages for our libraries in the future.  I adore this unit.  I think it's an absolute blast and I can't wait to put my knowledge to the test.  I never thought I'd be so excited about computers, or that they would be so important to librarians.  

And that, everyone, is the fruit-computer intersection.