Saturday, July 15, 2006

Recipes were made to be broken. At least in my book. Substitute here, cut there, make something better....Except that sometimes the recipes know what they're talking about. Which is why I just wasted 2 cups pretzels, 1/2 cup butter, 8 oz. cream cheese, 1 cup whipped topping, and some sugar. Said ingredients are now in a very unappetizing blob in our trash bin, baking in the sun.

See, I was making Strawberry Pretzel Dessert. I love this dessert, and try to eat it, if not make it, every summer. The crust is pretzels and butter and sugar. I decided to cut the butter from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup. This calculation makes sense; very rarely do we need all the butter in a recipe, just like we don't need all the sugar (which I cut from 3 TBLS to 1). Except, butter adds moisture, and moisture keeps a crust together. So, when I started slathering on the cream cheese mixture, it was very difficult to spread. The crust started coming up like a crumbly carpet. But being the adventerous cook, I decided to see what would happen if I just mixed the pretzels and crea, cheese mixture together. It would still taste good, right? Wrong. The yumminess disappeared to be replaced by the Pretzel Blob. No amount of squishing would make it lie flat. And so, with unceremonious anger and juvenile zeal, I used a spatula to plop the blob into the trash and announced "I'm never making another dessert again." (This is not the first dessert-in-distress I have conconcted).

The butter cutting was ill-advised. But for anyone who decides to make this dessert or has made it in the past, the 1 cup sugar in the cream cheese mixture is more than enough. The whipped topping is really sweet. I think 1/2 cup would suffice (I used 3/4 cup, and the mixture was too sweet). But then, you may not want to take my advice on this dessert.

1 comment:

Flmgodog said...

This is by far one of my FAVORITE desserts. My SIL makes this for all family functions. I believe I have the recipe for it but I pretend that I don't otherwise I would make it and then sit down and eat the WHOLE pan.
Sorry about the blog, tell me where it is maybe I will come eat it out of the trash...Sounds sick I know but I really love it!!!!