Of Cooking Embarrassments

In one of our IM chats, my sister and I got on the subject of embarrassing situations. We had some good laughs at each other’s expense describing sundry situations, various faux pas and a myriad of blunders making us blush and wishing the earth had opened and swallowed us.

As we exchanged stories we mentioned incidents in our children’s lives that occurred when they first learned to cook and bake. When my daughter was about 14, she liked to bake cookies and on occasion, a cake. We lived in California at the time, and the folks lived with us. During summer evenings, family members Margret and Chester, Maxine and Paul, and Lester would come by to chat and catch up on family news. Counting Mom and Dad, my self and my daughter, there would be at least 9 people and occasionally other friends.

On this particular day, my daughter baked a cake to be served during the evening, taking special care to have the frosting just right. The cake looked like a magazine photo. As the servings were passed around, lots of comments were made on how beautiful the cake looked and I was very proud of my daughter for having baked such a terrific cake!

The first person to take a bite let out a loud yell which grabbed everyone’s attention. The cake was SALTY! It turned out that my daughter had mistakenly measured salt rather than sugar, being unaware that Mom had put the contents of the salt box in a glass jar similar to the one we used for sugar. My daughter was mortified but we all had a good laugh and ate ice cream instead of cake.

My own most embarrassing cooking moment came when I planned to take two pumpkin pies to Adeline’s thanksgiving dinner. As I prepared the crusts and mixed the ingredients, I thought to myself how easy it was to make pumpkin pies in contrast to apple pies where lots of peeling and slicing was called for. I enjoyed the simple stirring process and when I poured the mixture into the crusts, took a few extra minutes to make interesting designs in each pie.

When it was time to leave the house to go to Adeline’s I carefully put the pies in food carriers and placed them in the car trunk so they would not get jumbled or upset. While driving to Adeline’s house, I suddenly realized that I had not baked the pies! I turned the car around and went back home, phoned Adeline and told her that I would be coming without them.

??? Is it Salt or Sugar ???