Saturday dinner party

This weekend, I embarked on cooking adventure #2.  This time, I decided to take on a challenge more within my abilities as a novice cook.  I also decided it would be fun to host some friends to try out my creation.  Julie and Chris were nice enough to suffer through.  The thing about Julie is that she is very complimentary - which is exactly what I needed.  When she first walked in the door, she started telling me how good everything smelled.  Thank God for her!

For dinner,  I decided to make a cashew chicken casserole.  Jared and I were given this recipe at one of our wedding showers and had not tried it yet.  It looked easy enough and had a lot of things we love...cashews, chicken and it was a dinner in a single dish.  I am not yet to the point that I want to multi-task!

I went to Wal-Mart and bought all the necessary supplies.  I am loyal to Publix - I love their customer service and fresh produce and don't mind paying a little more for their clean environment and friendly employees.  I felt like such a traitor going to Wal-Mart but the prices are very cheap.

I was very worried about this dish at first.  All the condensed soups did not look appetizing as I was preparing the mixture for baking.  But it turned out looking great!

For dessert, I pulled down a great looking recipe from Pinterest!  For those of you that are not familiar with Pinterest, you should be.  Pinterest is a virtual pinboard full of great ideas from home ideas to photo ideas to recipes.  I LOVE IT!  But it is another time-sucker (like Facebook).  I might be addicted. Back to the food...

The recipe was for Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes.  Follow this link to view the picture: http://pinterest.com/pin/68034676/.  It is copyrighted so I couldn't show it here.  These were very easy to make and I really enjoyed making them and eating the batter that was created.

A note on the foil cupcake liners - they had these white cupcake liners inside them and I had NO IDEA what they were for.  Should I leave them in or take them out?  As you can see, I took them out of all but one.  I didn't see where it made a difference but maybe with regular cupcakes, it does?

So how did everything taste?  The casserole was good but not my favorite.  It needed some more flavor and my dinner guests agreed (even Julie).  Overall, we gave the chicken casserole a...

Now, the Oreo cheesecake cupcakes were incredible!  I mean so delicious.  They had a full Oreo cookie at the bottom which was topped with an Oreo cheesecake mixture.  Heavenly... We gave the dessert a...

Definite improvement from last weekend's project and I added a dessert to our family menu for many years to come!