Dessert Disaster

    Several decades ago,  when I was still a fledgling cook, I produced one of my more memorable, though certainly not my only, culinary disasters. 
    But about ten years after the event the memory of my disaster was put to good use when The Columbus Dispatch sponsored a "Dessert Disasters" contest.  I entered my disaster and  mine was among the worst-disaster entries chosen for publication.
    So, as the difference between tragedy and comedy is time, here's the re-sharing of an event that was already well-aged when it was published in the Dispatch on May 18, 1994:

    One time I decided to throw a little dinner party to introduce some old friends to some new ones.  Nothing fancy, except for the desert!  I'd come across a recipe for lime chiffon pie, which sounded like the perfect dessert to impress the new friends and amaze the old.
    But I waited too late in the day to start the pie, and I suppose that in my hurry I must have thrown in too much of one ingredient or not enough of another, because the filling didn't gel and I ended up with lime soup in a crust.
    One old friend happened to arrive early enough to find me in the throes of panic.  He took the situation in hand and asked what he could do o help.  Run to the grocery store for me?  Buy something to salvage the dessert situation?
    Yes!  In a burst of inspiration, I rushed him out the door with instructions to bring me a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream.  I'd simply mix the lime liquid with the ice cream, let it freeze in the pie shell and serve up a lime chiffon ice cream pie.  An even better dessert than I'd planned!
    Now if back in high school I'd paid any more attention in chemistry class than I did in home economics, I'd have realized hat it takes more time for liquids to freeze into solids than it does to eat dinner.  Anyhow, we ended up eating not ice cream pie but  cold lime-vanilla flavored soup in which floated soggy pie-crust croutons.
    Of course the real disaster of the evening  was not the failed dessert but the nervous state to which I had at that point degenerated.
    After my new (former) friends had gone home, my old friend said, "Patti, if you wanted a pie for dessert why didn't you just tell me to buy you one from the store?  Or else you could have just served the ice cream plain instead of mixing it with the lime stuff."
    Duh!
    Do I laugh at that fiasco story today?  No, but I do tell it when I'm trying to impress friends at a dinner party.


     Here's  another more recent dessert disaster, already previously posted:

The centerpiece for Claire's wedding shower was supposed to look like this:

But turned out like this:

    "Good times, Sergeant-Major.  We'll have the again."
                                                       -Ward Just, "Soldiers."

    Everyone have a wonderful weekend! 8)