Thursday, June 6, 2019

A story of icing

Here's what happened to me yesterday. I didn't take any photos, so just create the pictures in your mind. Feel free to add all the messy kitchen components you can conjure up.

For this Friday's neighborhood potluck, I volunteered to bring dessert. About a month ago, I made one of my standbys, lemon-cream cookies. The recipe can be found here, and for purposes of the potluck I usually quadruple the recipe. I have the quadruple measurements written down so I can make it easily.

But last time I made these cookies, they went so fast that people were complaining they couldn't get seconds, so this week I decided to octuple the recipe, not quadruple it. Besides, we have new neighbors, and I wanted a few extra cookies to give them as a welcome gift.

Because this is a busy week, I made the cookies a couple days ago and put them in a sealed container to keep them fresh. Yesterday I decided to make the lemon cream filling that gets sandwiched between the cookies. But unlike the cookie recipe, I didn't have the quadrupled icing recipe written down, and of course this time I was octupling it. But no biggee, right? Just multiply everything by eight.

Which works great, unless you mistake teaspoons for tablespoons and multiply accordingly.

That's what happened when I was supposed to take four and a half teaspoons of lemon juice and multiply it by eight. Instead, I took four and a half tablespoons and multiplied. Suddenly, to the correct amount of butter and powdered sugar I had creamed together, I added a massive amount of lemon juice (two and a quarter cups).

So I'm standing there, staring blankly at this soupy mess of butter, sugar, and lemon juice, wondering what the heck I did wrong. It took me a few minutes to realize the teaspoon/tablespoon conundrum. Nuts.

I had two choices: I could either chuck the entire mess (wasting all the components), or I could multiply the butter and powdered sugar and add them to the soup. Since I had enough butter and sugar on hand, that's what I did. Now, instead of octupling the icing recipe, I was twenty-four-ing it.

Powdered sugar poofed up and coated everything in the kitchen as I kept transitioning to bigger and bigger bowls. Finally I abandoned bowls altogether and put everything into a three-gallon canning pot. Of course it was also too massive a job for my little hand mixer to tackle, so I grunted my way through mixing by using my biggest wooden spoon.

The result is, literally, gallons of lemon cream filling.

Fortunately it freezes well.

17 comments:

  1. Winston ChurchillJune 6, 2019 at 8:34 AM

    We'll be there in ten minutes, to help :)

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  2. Well now you have a lifetime supply. LOL

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  3. What a delicious mistake! Lemon is my favorite flavor.

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  4. guess who's bringing dessert for the next 5 or 6 pot lucks????

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  5. That is too funny, We all have done similar in our past :))

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    1. Yes we have. Mine was mixing too much hardener into fiberglass resin. My first clue (and last) was the pail getting hot. I tried to dilute it with more (expensive) resin... FAIL

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  6. Our entire family enjoyed your story. LOL!

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  7. Thank you for sharing. I thought you had to be over 75 to do that. I feel better now knowing it just ain't me. ---ken

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  8. I can totally imagine the powdered sugar poofing everywhere because I have done something like that before!

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  9. Oh, too funny (not for you, I imagine)! I have to wonder which was worse, the visuals in my head or the pictures that weren't, LOL!

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  10. Great story to start the day off right! Thank you.

    (I'm still chuckling to myself.)

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  11. I can't stop laughing, it will brighten my day each time I think of it. I am not laughing at you but me because this is kind of stuff I always do, lucky it is a yummy item. I myself have used the largest canning pot for mixing.

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  12. Been there, done that, got the tshirt!

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  13. I laughed so hard! Hilarious!

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  14. I love it. Not that you had so much trouble but well, if we can't laugh at things like that, life would not be nearly so interesting. I can just imagine a kitchen covered in white. Well, then I imagine the cook covered in white. LOL

    I have a "few" things that keep well in my freezer. Not telling what or how it came to be.

    Kathy in MS

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  15. Our daughter once read the chocolate chip cookie directions of 2 1/4 Cups of flour as "Two - one quarter cups" of flour. She caught a lot of grief over it, (but it was easy to fix) and the first 2 sheets of cookie "crumbles" made great ice cream topping! Natokadn

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  16. Ha! You were right! No pictures necessary! ;-)

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