mulberryshoots

My granddaughter, A., is studying for her final exams of her senior year at JHU. As you might recall, these are the ones that really count since 2nd semester is usually taken up with job interviews, graduate school applications and other things that Seniors occupy themselves with.

In honor of this intense timeframe, I’m making up a “Care Package” to send tomorrow. This morning, I made a big batch of rice crispy marshmallow treats.

Then, I made some “really crazy bars” copied from Ree Drummond’s recipe online. Here’s what I used:

1. Chocolate honey graham crackers (put sugar side down so it will show later after you’ve piled all the goodies on top.
2. Hershey’s milk chocolate bars (3) – which I thought were white chocolate because the wrapper was white, aiming for almond bark but couldn’t find any of either in the store. Chocolate on top of chocolate didn’t sound too bad, though.
3. Melted the chocolate in a double boiler set on low heat on the stove.
4. Laid out the chocolate graham crackers on to two baking sheets, cutting some of them to fit the entire sheets.
5. Spread the slightly cooled melted chocolate on top of the graham crackers, smoothing it out with a spatula so all the crackers are covered.
6. Then the toppings were added: Peanut M & M’s; Reese’s pieces in M-M form; salted stick pretzels, broken up (you want a combo of sweet and salty which are crunchy and chewy!)  Salted macadamia nuts, cut up into smaller pieces; mixed nut topping; cut-up bite-size Kit Kats, two kinds of multi-color sprinkles that filled up all the chocolate spaces.
7. Pressed the toppings gently into the chocolate; covered with clingwrap and put in the fridge for the whole thing to harden.
8. Later, will break the “bark” into manageable pieces and pack up in aluminum pans and wrap up for mailing.

I don’t even want to know how much sugar there is in these crazy bark pieces – the only way I can rationalize it is that they represent ALL the sugar I’m NOT going to be eating for the next five weeks!  YAY!

This is crazy, isn’t it? College students are young so they’ll probably be able to take it. Hope so, anyhow! Happy Exams!!