With Memorial Day coming, everyone’s making barbecue and picnic plans. Well, everyone except me. I tend to forget all about it until the last second or just shrug it off, figuring that if worse comes to worst, I’ll just throw some meat on a fire and be done with it.

But for you lovely people who plan ahead, think about this delightful no-bake dessert for your get-together time. These bars are made of egg-free Oreo cookie dough and topped with thick white chocolate fudge.

This time of year, I really need the extra sugar hit. Our students are in standardized testing for weeks on end, and the resultant disrupted scheduling can be challenging when you’re in the same classroom with the same kids for several hours on end. I get so hungry, too. And I need to use the bathroom.

One of the golden perks of summer is that I can use the bathroom whenever I need to. 10 months out of the year, I hold it in. After all, a teacher can’t leave her students unattended. But for those two months, the bathroom is actually a possibility. Sometimes I go there just because I can, not because I need to.

TMI? Yeah, well, try being a teacher. We’re not allowed to pee. We’re also not allowed to be considered experts in our own field. They hire people to make policies that make very little sense instead, people who have never taught a day in their lives. Good system, y’all.

Here’s an analogy for you: how about if we send a bunch of people who have eaten food into all of the restaurants in America so they can make policy decisions about how those restaurants should be run? I’m predicting a lot of grease fires, some small floods, and some very sub-par pastries.

The moral of the story: just because you’ve gone to school? Yeah, means nothing. You have no idea how a school runs or, even better, how it should. That might sound harsh, but the truth hurts.

I’ll soften the blow a little bit with these Oreo fudge cookie dough bars. The bottom layer is a thick cookie dough filled with cookies and cream flair, and a simple stovetop fudge (no candy thermometer needed!) rounds out the perfect topping.

I can’t teach everyone how to fix the education system, but I can give them nice treats to make things seem better. That’s not a bad way to start a week!

On the surface, these are the simplest brownies ever. They’re also the best, and completely impossible to resist. Oreo lovers, I dare you to walk away. Can you? Didn’t think so.

I’ve been in the dessert business now for two-plus years, and I can tell you that Oreos have a strong and very devoted following. I’m definitely a disciple. I’d rather have an Oreo any old day than a Girl Scout cookie (I know, I know). When I insert them whole into brownies? Yeah. See you all next week while I collapse on the floor in a chocolate cloud.

Oh, wait. Maybe I do have something to write about today other than Oreo obsession. Like Mother’s Day, which I hear is upon us.

I should know that, being a mother and all. But for me, the traditional Mother’s Day routine of breakfast in bed and flowers could be easily and more effectively replaced by a few mid-morning hours of Netflix bingeing in bed and a steady stream of cocktails and dessert bars throughout the afternoon.

Lately, I’ve been very into the word “adult” as a verb. As in, “I don’t feel like adulting today.” And boy, is that ever true so much of the time. Being a grown-up is hard, especially since we’re all just kids in older bodies. Or maybe you don’t feel that way, but I sure do.

See, I still get excited by things that a much younger person would be into. Not only do I embrace each new fashion trend with open arms (well, not the comeback of high-waisted pants, but you get my drift), but I also delight in all things pink, feel the constant urge to be in motion, and carry old-school metal lunchboxes to work with cartoon characters on them.

It doesn’t help that I’m relatively short and petite, so when I’m at work, I occasionally get yelled at for being in the halls during class. I wish our security people would look at my face a little more closely, because that part of me no longer passes for sixteen.

So why adult when I’m not in the mood? Specifically, why adult on Mother’s Day? As I said, forget the usual tokens of appreciation. Just give me a day where I do not have to adult, and we’ll all be fine.

And let me at these brownies. They make life sparkle. Have you noticed the Oreo in the center of each one? Have you? Have you?

As with most wonderful desserts that you feel like eating in PJs while wearing your fuzziest of fuzzy slipper booties, these don’t take much time to make. You can have your relaxation station time and still have brownies. That seems pretty good to me.

Happy Mother’s Day to all my friends, both real and imaginary. Here’s hoping you get a day without adulting. It’s my dearest wish to you!

There’s the convenience factor, sure. Paying someone to make dessert is a lot easier than rolling up your sleeves and doing it on your own, but on Valentine’s Day, we like to pull out all the stops and make the treats ourselves. So why pay a lot of money to an expensive chocolate shop for dipped Oreos?

These are just as good as the ones you pay for, if not better. See, they’re made with Double Stuf Oreos, which have more filling. They’re also blinged out for Valentine’s Day. There’s a video tutorial below, so enjoy!

Valentine’s Day is definitely a matter of some contention at my house. Kenny has always held the position that it’s a “Christian holiday” (his words, not mine), and since we’re not a Christian household, we should therefore be exempt from celebrating.

I’ve told him that I find his point of view to be highly inaccurate, and even did some research about the St. Valentine in question. There were apparently several priests of that name back in the day, the most famous one being the guy who agreed to marry young couples against the law and got killed for it. However, most sources agree that the holiday is not necessarily named after him.

Furthermore, a Pagan holiday known as Lupercalia occurred around the same time of year back then, and it was some kind of agricultural celebration. The holiday also had ties to fertility and coupling ceremonies, and rumor has it that the church decided to add more respectability to the occasion by naming the holiday after a saint.

Still, all of these are theories, not fact. I read at least five other accounts about how V-Day began, not to mention the theory that it mainly gathered steam after American capitalism saw it as a way to make some money.

Whatever the real story is, the holiday is so far removed from any roots that I persist in telling Kenny that we should celebrate the day. It’s about love, and I’m all for getting chocolate and a dinner out in the name of old-fashioned romance. He can just suck it up and go along for the ride, and so far, that’s pretty much what he’s done. He’s one of the good ones.

I’m all about the homemade food gifts on Valentine’s Day. Last week, I showed you how to make bark. Here’s how to make dipped Oreos!

See, it’s not hard at all. The important thing is to let the chocolate drip through the fork tines so that you don’t have an enormous pool of chocolate on your parchment paper. The drizzle and sprinkles on top can be in whatever pattern or color you desire!

Whether or not any of us can figure out how Valentine’s Day started, let’s keep our eye on the priorities: lots of chocolate. Then it’s a day that even the biggest hater can get behind!

After Halloween, there’s a ton of spilled candy corn everywhere. In pantries, cabinets, behind the fridge…yep. I wind up finding candy corn wedged into small spaces way after it’s out of season. How to deal with this?

Use it, fast! And the best way to transition from one holiday to the next is to use candy corn in these adorable chocolate ganache cupcakes. With an Oreo turkey on top, nobody can resist! Look at their little faces.

I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for pie-baking craziness and my mind is going a million miles an hour because I have endless ideas about what to bake this year. There are so many different options for pie out there, but our Thanksgiving table can only accommodate about five pies before things start to look really excessive.

In general, Thanksgiving is an easy holiday. It’s basically a menu with some preset factors (turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie) and room for lots of additions and creativity. I love to cook while watching the Macy’s parade on TV. If you get up at a decent hour and cook through the morning, that’s pretty much all the time you need for the main dishes and sides.

If you think I’m in the wrong here, that’s okay. I’m just saying that effort-wise, I find Thanksgiving to be on the lower maintenance end, though not quite so much as July 4th. And you can make dessert ahead of time, which is even more of a bonus. I have two pies already in the freezer and November just started. We’re making good time here!

Plus, once the meal starts, it’s nice just to sit back and have a glass of wine and enjoy. Or if you’re me, to take that glass of wine to the kitchen and pick at the turkey carcass. Sorry. I’m a scavenger, and it’s one of my favorite things to do on Thanksgiving.

In honor of what is definitely one of my favorite holidays, I also get crafty with the food. These cupcakes are a cute and easy addition to any Thanksgiving dessert spread. When my own kids saw these, their eyes lit up and they all wanted one right now. My daughter always tends to want things (insert demanding tone here) right now.

These are a fairly simple chocolate cupcake (but you can use a mix if you like to save time) with a quick ganache topping. The most time-consuming part of this is making the little turkeys. Those candy corn feathers really want to fall out of the top. I found myself working hard to make sure each one wound up with four feathers. If I were less anal-retentive, I would have let my kids make these with me. Mine are a little young, but older kids can definitely help out here.

Once these are atop your cupcakes, it’s open season on Thanksgiving celebrations. The best part of the holiday is coming together over food that people prepare with lots of love. Why not start the celebration a little early this year?

Seriously, I bought these s’more-flavored Oreos a month ago. And I was all excited about making something with them with the vague intention of having it be s’moreo cupcakes. Life got in the way, and it didn’t happen. The cookies just sat in my cabinet until a few days ago, when fate intervened.

I was trying to make cheesecake bars and realized after I began (hate it when this happens) that I was out of both graham cracker crumbs and graham crackers. But instead of giving up, which is not what a baker does, I remembered the s’moreos. And suddenly, these cheesecake bars crystallized in my head and came to life!

The inspiration is running a little low this week. Even though I have most of the summer off, this week I’m in meetings for our school leadership team. That translates into a lot of sitting still. I don’t know about you, but sitting still is one of my least favorite things to do unless the day is almost over and I’m too tired to move.

I need to move throughout the day. Movement is a friend. More and more studies are showing that jobs involving a lot of sitting do a horrible number on your heart, stress level, mind, and body in general. That’s why teaching is such a good fit for me. It’s lots of standing, all day long. But sitting in meetings and starting at PowerPoints until everything glazes over and my butt is numb? No, thank you.

After a day like today, it’s hard not to come home and stress eat lots of less than healthy foods. But that’s where these cheesecake bars really help. They’re made with low-fat cream cheese and hardly any sugar, just a quarter of a cup. Some of you might find the base a little too tart, but I think it balances all the other sweetness perfectly. If you like a sweeter base, just increase the amount to a half cup.

Cheesecake bars are a perfect use for these s’moreos. I was never really feeling the cupcake idea, which is why weeks passed and nothing happened. This is a much better way to go. The cheesecake base could not be simpler. It’s four ingredients, all of which you regularly keep in your fridge. Milk chocolate chips get folded into the filling, and then I broke up a few s’moreos for the top.

To be honest, I’m totally zonked from a day of staring at screens and listening to one presentation after another. It makes me really grateful that my job is in the classroom where I can interact with other people in an active way. So summer is still on, but I’m excited to eat cheesecake bars and think about teaching again. It’s a lot better than sitting still for hours!

-How does available space get filled so fast?

-Why doesn’t healthy food taste like brownies?

-If a tree falls in the forest and we think there’s nobody to hear, did it maybe crush the one person who was out for an early morning stroll?

-How do you keep small children occupied on endless snow days when you’re all trapped together in the house?

I have very few answers, but the last one has to be projects, projects, projects. Keep those little hands busy!

Everyone’s different, and here’s my confession of the day: I am a better mom when I do the job part-time. In other words, I love my kids, but I also need my teaching job, and not just for the big bucks. It keeps me sane. Teenagers are fun to work with. And it also helps me appreciate my time with little sticky-handed people at home more.

On a recent series of snow days, I enlisted the help of my gang to make these flowerpots. Don’t be alarmed: these pots have never been used for anything but food! Don’t use ones you find in your garden shed. Did I need to say that?

I chose springy colors because, well, a girl can wish. After that, the fun begins! The cookies and cream mousse is simplicity itself. You melt chocolate and fold it into Cool Whip.

Once that’s done, you mix it up well and add crushed Oreos. Stirring is the fun part!

And you have to let everyone have a turn.

Once the mousse is done, you begin filling your flowerpots. You can fill them as high as you like. I dolloped out generous helpings, but then again,  I had a lot of helpers. Not just my own kids, either. Some other kids showed up at some point. I’m not sure how that happens, but my house is a magnet for crumb-crunchers.

Make sure the mousse in the flowerpot is evened out on top before adding your Oreo “dirt.” It looks just like dirt, by the way. Very appetizing.

Then comes your garnish in the form of gummy worms (many of which were eaten in the process of making these, oops) and some lovely floral cocktail sticks. It’s what I had. You can use the same, or be really ambitious and make edible flowers.

The kids got a little too enthusiastic with their garnishes, by the way. But whatevs.

And when they were done, they were proud. And sugared up. And hyper. And I was a puddle on the floor.

But now, faithful readers, I’m back at work, i.e. the magical place where I can go to the bathroom by myself and even (gasp!) finish a sentence. It’s glorious.

Hey, I don’t have any answers. Life is tough and full of puzzling conundrums. But I do know that doing a project with kids is enough to take down even the best of mothers, so I’m proud to be still standing with cookies and cream mousse in hand. I mean, flowerpot.

You might have noticed that I didn’t really write a lot about Christmas, other than fact that the religion I belong to doesn’t do that holiday. Nope, I don’t have a tree. But I love baking for others during the holiday season even more. It’s such a great time for cookies and cheer!

When all the festivities have ended, my pantry is still full of holiday chips and holiday Oreos and the like. So this morning, I baked up these bars. They’ll be making the rounds to people this weekend who (I hope) appreciate them.

My post today is short because I spent the holiday yesterday with my family. I’m lucky enough to live near my siblings, and we had a great day together. Our kids love one another and, not having a Christmas dinner to consume, we went out to eat. French fries were involved. I was a happy camper.

But in the middle of the family and the hugs and all of the fun, I still had time to bake these, photograph them, and eat them. It added a little extra joy to the day!

If you’re like me and your pantry is full of half-used bags of holiday-themed treats, make these bars! I’ll write in the recipe what I used, but you can use any combination of treats you like.

And if you’d like to see me bake something specific in the new year, let me know! I’m having a bit of baker’s block these days, so suggestions are welcome!

This final offering is made with white chocolate (yep, I’ve done milk and dark already this week) and it’s soft and perfectly fudgy. To be honest, I wanted to use Chanukah colors for this fudge, but guess what? Oreo doesn’t make a Chanukah variety, and Nestle doesn’t do blue chips. I had to keep the colors to Christmas. That’s okay!

But let’s focus on what’s going on here. This fudge is surrounding Oreos. And holiday chips. And it’s so decadent and delightful!

Unlike my other two fudges this week, I made this one on the stovetop. White chocolate is not chocolate, and it’s finicky. If you melt it down too much, if it gets even slightly overheated, the stuff seizes up and becomes unworkable. So I prefer to use the stove because I can stir as it melts and take it off the heat at just the right moment.

A lot of people make their white chocolate fudge with heavy cream, or marshmallow cream, or both. You can go that route, but I’ve never been into fussing. The more ingredients you put into fudge, the higher the chance of messing it up. So my trusty sweetened condensed milk and I will stay together forever!

Once your fudge base is melted and ready to go, you just barely stir in the mix-ins. Too much stirring will bring color streaks into your pretty white fudge. Maybe you want that, but I did not. Something about wintry white fudge this time of year is really appealing to me! Probably because I envision eating it under a blanket while staring out at the snow falling. And yes, it makes a great gift!

Considering it’s just kind of gray and gross outside, that’s another fantasy for another day. For now, the fudge itself will have to do. And believe me, it’ll make you happy enough!

I love dessert. And so when I enjoy it, which is every day, I enjoy it at its best. But I also do so in moderation. Every recipe on this site gets tested by yours truly, but after those initial bites, the rest goes to other people. Sometimes I eat quite a bit more than a few bites, or something is just too amazing to give away. But I also temper that with lean proteins, veggies, and a daily and extremely rigorous exercise schedule.

In other words, I do not advocate an unhealthy lifestyle, no matter how much decadence you see here. And I do realize that every now and then, I have to scale back a bit. These cookie bars are a perfect example.

When I make salad dressing, I’m very fond of using a sugar and Stevia blend. Domino makes one, and so do a few other companies. It’s very sweet, and a little goes a long way. If you overuse it, the sweetness is cloying. And it’s hard to use the product in baking without it being noticeable, so when I do, I use it sparingly. Stevia is the only artificial sweetener I’ll use, because the others come with a laundry list of potential side effects and issues. Stevia is a more natural option.

Now, let’s be real here. This is only half the usual amount of sugar, so it’s not totally free of that controversial white substance. And there are the Oreos and chocolate chips to account for, but I used them sparingly. Basically, this is not low-fat, nor is it sugar-free. It’s just a little better than your typical tricked-out cookie bar.

And so festive for the holidays! I love the way these look. They’re a perfect addition to your holiday cookie plate. I doubt that anyone will realize that they’re lower in sugar!

As a whole, people like chocolate more than fruit. They especially like peanut butter with chocolate more than fruit, and I agree on that point a bazillion percent. While opinions differ in regards to many cookies, most people can’t resist a really good chocolate chip cookie.

And even fewer people will turn their noses up at anything with cookies and cream. In fact, whenever I make anything that involves Oreos, I have to hide in a corner while a stampede (comprised in part by people I don’t know that well, if at all) grabs at what I’ve done and totally eliminates its existence.

Well, I’d better hide. This cookie cake is extreme. Not only is the base itself filled with Oreos in every corner of every bite, but it’s also topped with more Oreos, Hershey’s cookies and cream kisses, and Hershey’s cookies and cream drops. Oh, and there’s frosting, too.

While we’re on the subject of cookie cakes, I should probably emphasize how much I love them. They’re a lot more exciting than cakes, they’re tricked out just like cake, and they’re a lot easier to make than cookies. There’s no dough chilling involved, no forming of dough mounds. You just press the dough into the pan, bake, and decorate!

For the frosting, I made the vanilla buttercream from Lindsay’s recipe. If you don’t read Lindsay’s blog, go there immediately. She is one of the most talented cake bakers ever. I love her buttercream because it holds up beautifully and it’s not as oily as the frostings you get from bakeries that use shortening exclusively. This is a butter-shortening hybrid.

From there, just pile on all of the candy and cookies and you’ve got yourself a cake nobody will forget! Don’t hold back. Let the cookies and cream madness out!