Engineers and Free Food

Woke up early this morning and made a pan of "Almost Candy Bars". (Yes- I just had so much time on my hands with mid-terms, work deadlines, chairing a holiday fundraiser, and a river flooding in my back yard!)

Every year our work group adopts foster children for the holidays. We have 6 kids this year and I have found that the best way to drum up donations is to supply free food.

As I stated previously, I work mostly with men. These are engineers -highly specialized and extremely well paid scientists. Their response to free food is something of a conundrum to me. Free food attracts engineers like flies to fly paper. These guys are very generous too when it comes to fundraisers- we had 30 employees last year donate $800.

So in the spirit of soliciting the same response this year, I made these Almost Candy Bars. They are so quick and easy to do, that even waterlogged, stressed out and overcommitted project managers in grad school can do it! Enjoy!!!

Almost Candy Bars

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Take a box of Pillsbury Super Moist Devils Food Cake mix. Cut in 1/2 cup of butter until crumbly. Press this mixture lightly into the bottom of a 15 x 9 inch baking dish.

Sprinkle 1 cup of each of these on top of the cake mix crust:

• semi sweet chocolate chips
• butterscotch chips
• chopped walnuts
• sweetened coconut

Pour one 14 oz can of Sweetened Condensed Milk evenly over the top. Bake in oven for 20-30 minutes or until light brown on top.

Flood update: Water is receding...didn't get as high as they predicted, only 19 feet. Baseball field was heavily flooded last night when the river crested- looked like a lake, but when I woke this morning it was greatly reduced- just a few huge puddles. Sunny days are planned through Monday!