Lesson Learned

Ah... weekends. Two more days to play with my new mixer! Husband and I went on a fun Friday night date to the supermarket, so I was all ready to continue with my experimentations.

Alas, did you know that you cannot make meringues with store bought egg whites? I didn't! Turns out it says so on the carton, in tiny writing. Who has time to read tiny writing in the grocery store? I didn't have time to read it until after my failure had become obvious. At this point my plans fell apart and I threw some flour into the frothy not whipped egg whites and sugar... and called it a cake? (more like guessed it a cake). Actually, I think almost accidentally created an angel food cake, it puffed up huge in the oven, but then deflated to the thickness of a pancake (which is pretty much exactly what happened the time I tried to make an angel food cake for real). This "cake" tasted great, but was impossible to eat, it was like chewing gum with a crunchy layer on top... I salvaged a few crunchy bits (husband declared them a delicious breakfast the next morning) and started over with REAL, HAND SEPARATED egg whites. Finally, SUCCESS! All these, from just 2 egg whites:

They look kind of like peeps, don't they?

While all of this was happening, I had some ropa vieja in the crockpot, getting ready for our dinner guests from Thundermoon Farm (not the animals of course!). But I still needed to make dessert! I had some leftover pound cake that was tasty but dry, and strawberries were on sale this week... so my plan was to try out my mixer on some home made whipped cream to tie those two together! I though to myself, if I succeeded in whipping egg whites, cream will be easy, right? WRONG! I don't know what I did wrong, but my whipped cream wouldn't get whippy enough! Tasted fabulous though... especially with a little sugar and vanilla thrown in... mmm. Unfortunately I only ended up with about half as much whipped cream as estimated... so my trifle was more like an ugly single layer mess that tasted great.

Dinner was a success, I taught our guests how to play Scattergories (which, as I discovered thanks to college roomies is 2nd only to trivial pursuit, and muuuuch easier to play), and we had a great night! Fun was had by all (I hope)!