When I was growing up, Kansas might as well have been Oz. It felt about as real then, before my parents moved from our small New England town to the Plains. I moved in with them not long after, while I was taking time off from college. Looking for something worthwhile to do, I ended up in an accounting course at Johnson County Community College, in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park.

My professor, Ellen Fisher, had been teaching Accounting 101 since the early 1980s, and to me, a transplant, she embodied the best of the Midwest. She was humble, chipper, and very, very nice. I asked the dumbest questions about the most rudimentary concepts. She burst with enthusiasm as she broke them down into terms that even I could understand.

Her generosity of spirit extended beyond office hours. On the day of our final exam, she brought in a Tupperware filled to the brim with homemade Oreo truffles. She passed them to every student before even distributing the exam packets—along with the recipe, written on an index card.

I went on to ace that final exam. To this day, I’m convinced that it was because of those three-ingredient bites, which eat like Munchkin-sized versions of Kansas Dirt Cake, They’re still part of my repertoire. While I’ve forgotten just about everything I learned in that intro-level accounting class, I’ll never lose this handy recipe from Kansas City.