Tuesday, September 14, 2010

1/2 of 1 = 1?

I'm blaming it on my father-in-law.  It's just easier that way.  And he doesn't know that I have a blog....

Last week, he bought this at the grocery store....












Who buys cranberry sauce in September?

Then, this morning, he left this sitting out on the counter....

So, I checked and yes, indeed, we had some of this in the freezer....

Therefore, I had no choice but to make Cranberry Crunch....which, by the way, is one of his favorites, even though he won't admit that he eats dessert.

So, this morning, I went ahead and put the rest of the ingredients on counter....brown sugar, flour, and butter, to give the butter a chance to soften and also serve as a visual reminder to actually make cranberry crunch rather than think all day, "What was I going to bake this afternoon?"  Trust me, it happens.

When I was ready to assemble and bake, I decided to cut the recipe in half since it wasn't Thanksgiving, and I didn't think we needed a large 9x13 pan of it.  I would bake it in the cast iron skillet instead.  Now, cranberry crunch is probably my only recipe that measures the ingredients by weight....

1lb oatmeal
1lb brown sugar
1lb flour
1lb butter - although, since I like to be health conscious, I cut the butter back to 3 sticks, instead of 4....

So, out comes the kitchen scale.  I weigh out 1/2lb of oatmeal, 1/2 lb brown sugar, 1/2 lb flour and then add the 3 sticks of butter that were sitting on the counter.  I start mixing and think, hmmm, even though I cut back on the butter, this still seems pretty moist and sticky.....Then it hit me.  I use 3 sticks of butter for a full recipe!  Now I had 100% more butter than I needed.  So much for being health conscious....  I considered my options for about 30 seconds...
1.  This would rank as the best cranberry crunch ever and then we would all croak from clogged arteries...
2.  Just go ahead and make a full recipe... but that would require getting the kitchen scale back out after putting it away and getting out the 9x13 pan when the skillet was sitting right in front of me.
3.  Wing it and add more oats, flour and brown sugar to make approximately 3/4 of the original recipe.

I decided on #3....although #1 was tempting....

And, I've also decided that doubling recipes is much more fun than halving them.



3 comments:

  1. You're not alone in bad recipe math. :) You may know this story, having spent quality time with our family, but we have this oatmeal raisin cookie recipe that has tripped all of us up. The very first time I made the cookies by myself, I measured super carefully, and I double-checked everything, but the cookies were horrible. My dad managed to choke one down without making a face, but they were really terrible. My mom and I reviewed my process, ticking off each ingredient and the correct amount. She got to brown suger and called out 1 & 1/3 cup, but I had only seen 1/3 cup on the recipe card. I insisted it had only said 1/3, so she pointed at the card, where it now clearly looked like 1 & 1/3. Flash forward two years, and Catherine and Andrew were making the same recipe. They both looked over the card, triple check the amounts, and proceeded to put in 1/3 cup of brown sugar, resulting in the same horrible cookies I made before. The goofy part is that they swore, like I had, that the card only said 1/3 cup, but once they looked again, it couldn't have been more obviously 1 & 1/3. We decided that the card giveth sugar and the card taketh it away on all first time bakers.

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  2. Anne, you've got me cracking up. Baking KILLS me most of the time!

    So what I want to know, Allison -- how'd it turn out? CAN you make a half recipe of cranberry crunch?

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  3. It definitely turned out good....it's hard to mess up brown sugar and butter (well, except maybe when the Lindbloms are baking), but it was more like 3/4 of a recipe, so as of yet, I have not made just a 1/2 recipe.

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