Halloween Candy Fail

My very small children collected their weight in candy last Thursday.  Determined to get some it out of the house I decided to make cookies with chopped up candy in place of the chocolate chips and then give them away to neighbors.

First, I selected the candy I was most likely to eat myself: milky ways, crunch bars and m&ms.  Then I mixed up my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe and threw the candy in at the end.  I have made this recipe more times than I can count.  I barely need to look at the recipe to know the amounts of the ingredients.  You would think that this would be fool poof.

However, the cookies melted quickly and came out thin.

I don't know if the candy changed things or I just messed up.  Bryce claims I needed more flour.  Those pictured look ok, but the more I made the worse they got.  Now I am stuck with ugly, flat sugary things with too many calories.  I can't give them away; they are just too embarrassing. 

I finally gave up and froze the rest of the dough in balls.  I can now make more ugly, flat cookies with too many calories on another day.  Oh, goodie.

What We Ate for Dinner: Leftovers and another Failure

I made the elk meatballs again.  Sometimes leftovers are nice.

I also put together the curry potato casserole that I mentioned here.  While it looked nice, it did not taste nice.  The curry was too hot and the potatoes didn't have a soft potato-like texture.  I have been looking for more things to do with dehydrated potatoes, but so far hash browns and funeral potatoes are all I got.  I think it's the texture.  Oh, well.

A Spectacular Failure

I decided to try and make strawberry shortcake strictly from food storage stuffs.  I don't recommend it.  Some ideas sound good in theory.  But theories do not always taste good.

The whipped cream.  The reason I decided to try it out was the can you see at the left.  This is one of the cans we got from Bryce's grandma's house.  I have no idea how old it is.  The instructions claimed that you could make whipped cream.  I was skeptical but thought it was worth a shot.  I was right to doubt.  Powder and water do not whipped cream make. It smelled a lot like butter powder (which, when you think about it--butter comes from cream--it makes sense).  I'll probably use it as butter powder in some of my mix recipes.

The cake.  The cake was to be made from flour, sugar, baking powder, powdered butter, salt, an egg and water.  Somehow I thought oat flour was a good idea.  The cake turned out really dense.  I don't know if it was the flour or the butter powder that failed me.  Bryce didn't like it.  I thought it tasted ok.  But what it needed was real whipped cream.

The Strawberries.  I attempted to reconstitute some freeze dried strawberries with water, sugar and cornstarch, hoping that it would make a nice syrup.  Well, it made a syrup, but nice is not a word I would use.  I probably used too much sugar and boiled it too long.

There you go.  Not everything I make works out.  And sometimes living on food storage is not as much fun as having real food at your disposal.  Lesson learned.