Baking with Absolutely Nothing

We've had a wild weekend, so today is a catch-up day and a birthday celebration all in one. ;) I'll tell you all about it later, so for now I leave you with this adventure from a few weeks ago...

It all started when I decided I should try to bake something out of absolutely nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Just no eggs, no butter (or at least hardly any to speak of), no whipping cream, and no baking chocolate. I spent over an hour searching the internet for recipes that had the keywords “eggless”, “lemon”, and “cream cheese”. (It’s pretty rare for us to have cream cheese. The only reason we did was because I forgot we had some and didn’t use it on our bagels.) ; )

If you’re eggless you’re supposedly vegan, and they don’t use cream cheese. If you are using cream cheese, you’re probably going to make cheese cake; and you definitely need cream. And if you want to switch over from lemon to something with chocolate, you of course need baking chocolate.

For once, the internet had nothing. Nothing for my unique circumstances, that is. I did find a few recipes to save for later when we finally grocery shopped and it was the proper time between sweets again.

So I got very daring. I decided to make something up.

Cutting my precious loaf of cream cheese in half, just in case one of my experiments turned out super disgusting, I made a lemony-spready-thingy out of part of it. It didn’t turn out the bestest ever (baking gives me lapses in grammar); but what I did with the other half of the cream cheese turned out pretty amazing. Which is nothing short of a miracle, since I had nothing to go on; and I have a reputation of being a walking kitchen disaster.

Taking the other half of the cream cheese, I whipped it up in the blender with some powdered sugar, milk, and cocoa powder. (No baking chocolate!) It turned out really chocolate-y, and cream cheese-y, and lapses-in-grammar-y with just the perfect hint of sweetness. And my taste testers had very positive things to say. So far so good.

Then I got really creative. I’ve recently been drooling over a book on mini pies, so I immediately decided that this pudding stuff wouldn’t stay pudding stuff. I had been fortunate enough to find a few pie crust recipes that didn’t take oil (I was searching sour cream ones before I found out that the tub we had in the frig was two months out of code); but I also was advised by dear Mom that that wouldn’t be the right thing for the filling I had made. Think, think, think. No graham crackers. We buy those about as often as Shemitah and the blood moons line up.

We had some Nutter Butter cookies in the pantry which I decided would have to do, and I gleefully smashed them up with a rolling pin. Taking the half stick of butter left in the house (it wasn’t enough for anything else anyway), I mixed it with the cookie crumbs and a bit of powdered sugar into a gooey, icky-looking dough.

Don’t laugh, but I greased three spaces of our twelve count muffin tin (that’s all I could make!) and pressed the crust into it. After it had baked in the oven for a while, I took it out and was surprised to find that the crust had risen and completely filled up the muffin spaces. So much for filling. I really should have looked up how to do this. Doing the only thing possible, I smashed the middle of each down with a spoon while it was still hot and left them to cool until I felt I could take them out without breaking them.

They broke a little when I took them out; but that pleased the taste testers (who thought this part tasted good as well), and I was able to paste most of it back together with the filling. Carefully spooning in the filling so that the walls of cookie would not crumble, I admired my work and asked for a bit of Dad and Mom’s chocolate syrup for their coffee to drizzle on top. Now it looked like something real; not just crazy Kate’s unnamed experiment that might turn out to be a real treat or the new atom bomb.

I put it in the refrigerator until we ate it the next day. There was only three, remember? Perfect number for our family to divide up. Everyone ended up with an allotted piece, and the taste tasters were satisfied again. (There were even offers to buy the pieces that belonged to people who couldn’t eat them yet.) I was surprised, delighted, and blessed. I’ve ruined so many real recipes before (or at least almost ruined them) that who could have guessed a complete experiment would turn out so well?

I really enjoyed baking this dessert out of absolutely nothing (or almost nothing, anyway) and really enjoyed eating it. Next time, I’ll use all the cream cheese, more Nutter Butters, and possibly a mini muffin tin so the “recipe” stretches farther. And I’ll look up parbaking or whatever it’s called. ; )

Now, what do I do with that lemon frosting stuff? Hmm…

And isn’t amazing how God can orchestrate something as small as forgetting to use the cream cheese so that I had it later when I wanted to bake something?