Just re-learned a quick lesson that someone like me that bakes/cooks should know by now. If you plan on making something, before you even begin, make sure you have all ingredients on hand. Don’t assume that you have something stashed away. Measure it all out and set it aside. I mean, one you start assembling it, there’s no turning back. If you find that you’re missing something, you’ll end up searching high and low for substitutes. If you’re lucky, or have a bit of an baking-MacGyver thing going on, you might just be able to eke something out. At least, that’s what happened to me tonight.

After a dinner consisting of pizza and sweet potato fries I decided to slap together something quick and easy. In terms of baking, one of the easier recipes I have on hand is the lemon square recipe. There are two components to it: the cookie base and the flavoured part on top. A while ago, I figured out that the flavoured part could easily be changed up to something other than lemon. I’ve tried oranges long ago. That was all right, but nothing special–preferred lemon to this. I tried strawberries last year but I didn’t get the proportions right so I ended up with some off-colour reddish goo. Sure, it tasted great, but it wasn’t something I’d be proud of. By far, the most successful substitution that I’ve done for this recipe is crème de menthe. That was done only a few weeks ago. The results were so minty and refreshing. They were simply awesome, so I told myself that it was a recipe that I wanted to nail down and perfect. Tonight was my second go at it.

So, after softening some butter I started hunting for icing sugar. The base is basically three components: flour, icing sugar, and butter. Simple, right? I knew that we had a new bag of icing sugar lying around somewhere but I couldn’t find it at all. I searched everywhere but had no luck. Instead of giving up though, knowing that icing sugar is also known as powdered sugar, I decided to take some regular sugar and grind it down. I required a half cup of it and luckily I had just enough to meet the requirement. Once it was down to a fine powder, I added it to the mix. Great!

As the base was in the oven, I started working on the top component. I cracked four eggs and started hunting for sugar. Would have been fine except…I had used the sugar for the icing sugar. Crap! Usually we have a bag of sugar stocked in the pantry. I was relying on it being there, but I was out of luck. I ended up having to cobble together something from a bit of white sugar, organic sugar, light brown sugar and dark brown sugar. Yeah, we had all of those on hand in small quantities. I had enough to make the required two cups, but if I’m being honest I’m a little bit concerned how the different sugar is going to affect the flavour.

It’s now out of the oven. I’m going to let it rest overnight before cutting it up. Hopefully it turns out OK. Sure, it wasn’t exactly an ideal test run but relying on my baking ingenuity was rather cool. Yeah yeah, I shouldn’t have had to, but no matter.