high-bar baking

This is why we have friends. I woke up this morning to a text from my best friend asking if I had any good solutions to the problem of 4 ounces of leftover cream cheese. 

Before this text, I did not. Four ounces of cream cheese is ridiculous and yet utterly commonplace; it’s the amount left over from cinnamon roll frosting, for one. That was her specific issue. I try to avoid having the problem entirely, which is why I always double my Miss Kelli’s Cookies recipe. But sometimes doubling won’t do. Nobody needs that much cream cheese frosting for a cinnamon roll. 

The other recipes I tried suggesting were their own massive amounts of work. Sarah has a brilliant cinnamon roll blondie recipe, but it has three components and dirties what feels like half the dishes in my apartment in the process. I don’t need to bind myself to a separate boatload of work on top of the boatload I voluntarily signed up for in the first place.

This hit particularly close to home because in that moment I had a block of cream cheese sitting softened on the counter for the Key Lime Pie Bars I was bringing to a Cinco de Mayo party this evening. She asked the question I’d been asking myself, and I had no good answer. What to do with the second half of the block?

But this is why human connection is magical. Frankly, I was probably going to throw it out. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve done it before. It doesn’t keep! It rots, and you can’t freeze it! But because she asked, I thought about it. Really thought. I wanted to be able to give her an answer I’d be proud of.

So after flipping through some of my books and finding nothing, I had an idea so dumb that it actually might work. Cream cheese won’t freeze. But cream cheese frosting… will. 

Whip up a quick half batch of cream cheese frosting and store it for a naked cake sometime in the future. Brilliant! Then bestie added a second dimension, suggesting a pumpkin loaf or a banana bread could use it as a topping too. Even better! I’m not even committing myself to a full layered cake. 

So that’s what I did. And it probably sounds really mundane, and you can believe that if you’d like. But to me, it was a little bit of magic. A spark of inspiration and a little nudge to think harder just when I needed it.

Now I’ve got cream cheese frosting in the freezer and cream cheese whipped cream on my Key Lime Pie Bars. If you haven’t had cream cheese whipped cream before (I hadn’t), I cannot recommend it highly enough. WOW is it perfect. I always forget how much I want a little tang until I find it. 

Personally, I think the bars could have done with half the amount of whipped cream, though. The ratios were a little off. I also left out the mint flavourings because I don’t like mint, but that’s of course your call. As you can tell from the pictures, my one drop of gel food colouring went a little wild. Shamrock Shake wild. So maybe use regular old school food colouring in the future, if you’re doing this? Or embrace the excessive. Ooh, dibs on the band name. 

In the words of the great Hemingway, “Write drunk; edit sober.” Happy Cinco de Mayo, folks.