The recipe I have calls for 7 cups of flour. It seems like a lot, but when you're making sugar cookies, the thicker they are the better...that way they "need" more frosting. So, this one recipe doesn't go very far. I usually double it for our family. Yes, we eat lots of them...it is Christmas after all.
This time I decided to triple the recipe, which would mean 21 cups of flour. I figured I would save some time by making all my measurements in the biggest capacity I could. For example: if I needed 3 teaspoons of something, I could just use 1 tablespoon instead (because that's the RIGHT conversion).
So, I go online to my trusty Google search engine and type in the conversions I needed and wrote down everything in my recipe as converted to triple it's size.
Well...I should've paid more attention to Jacob's homework the week before from Science about mass/density and volume. My conversion for flour was not really for flour. I got a conversion for water or liquid. Because flour doesn't weigh as much as water. DUH.
So, what I though the conversion said was that 21 cups of flour equals 11 pounds...but it meant WATER equals that.
YES, okay...I added 11 pounds of flour to my recipe...which, for those of you who know how to do math, is 42..yep...FORTY-TWO cups of stinkin flour.
Before I caught my mistake, I got all the ingredients added, which also include 12 eggs, 6 cups of sugar, 6 cups of shortening and 3 cups of milk...and some other things. I still had not figured out my mistake, until I could barely get my hands out of the flour mixture because it was so stiff.
I was probably all shades of purple and red by the time I figured out what I had done. Really? I'm that out of it? I DOUBLED THE TRIPLE RECIPE.
Well, I was going to beat that dough. Not literally as it smacking it around, but as in WINNING. I was going to save those cookies and make all of them. Take that google search and 11 pounds of flour. I'll show you.
But that means I had to add all the other ingredients, AGAIN. I was out of shortening and eggs. Cleaned up my mess, ran to the store, in the snow, and got my stuff. Back to the dough. Added 12 more eggs, more milk, shortening, sugar and the other stuff.
If at this point you are wondering what stinking large bowl I would have to own in order to pull this off...well, I do have a pretty big bowl, but not big enough for this to be very easy. I was going at snail's pace and working all this in very slowly to avoid total explosion. Well, I did pretty good, but I was wearing some by the end and of course, it was all over the floor.
And when it was all over, I had the perfect dough. It was about 6pm and the kids were wondering if we were going to eat sugar cookies for dinner. So, I stopped. Put all the dough in bags and into the freezer. Someday in the future I would look at that dough again and maybe cook it.
But, I did it. I saved the dough. I beat the flour. And next time...in ONE whole year from now when I attempt this again, I will measure the flour, ONE CUP AT A TIME.
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