I had a horrible time in the kitchen yesterday afternoon. Everything went wrong. It all started with The Baby Nickel. He was tired and needed a nap (or maybe, I needed him to take a nap), but even after forty-five minutes of flopping about beside me on the bed (while I finished reading See You In A Hundred Years—a book that partly inspired and mostly irritated me), he didn’t go to sleep. I had hoped to write and was plenty annoyed about his wide-open blue eyes. They were pretty, but at that time of day I think he’s cuter with his eyes shut.

I came downstairs, made coffee, and decided to make Deb’s Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake, except I didn’t have any hazelnuts so I substituted pecans. The recipe said to toast the pecans, but I burned them. The second time around I scorched them.

The Baby Nickel and Sweetsie were hovering close by, trying to get as near me as possible, climbing stools, chattering away, picking up utensils and lifting lids, and generally disturbing my (what was becoming sparse) mental peace, but it wasn’t until I was dumping the second ruined batch of pecans into the compost, that I blew a gasket. I started yelling, I AM SO MAD. I CAN’T BELIEVE I DID THAT! GET AWAY FROM ME! And once I started I couldn’t stop, though I did have the presence of mind to clarify myself to my wary offspring: I AM NOT MAD AT YOU! I AM MAD AT MYSELF! EVERYONE GET AWAY FROM ME! OUT OF THE KITCHEN! GO! GET OUT OF HERE! Nickel backed up a little, hovering around the kitchen’s periphery, giggling nervously, and Sweetsie made a beeline to her bedroom where she listened to her tapes, sucked her thumb and twiddled her spit rag. (Later when I went up to apologize for my outburst, she turned her back and wouldn’t talk. I wonder how many therapy sessions she’ll need as a result of that little outburst of mine.)

The third time I tried to toast the pecans, they did not burn. But that was mostly because they didn’t even get toasted, just barely heated through, but by that point I didn’t care—they weren’t burned, and that was what mattered.

The cake, which should have been a fragrant, delicate affair, flopped. The half-pound of vanilla bean-infused butter, the cup (plus two more) of pecans, the six egg whites, were all for naught because I under-baked the cake. It tasted of pecan dough, densely saturated with butter. Edible, yes, but not what it should of been. (I wondered if I could crumble up the cake and toast it to make sweetened crumbs that could then be sprinkled over a fruit crisp, but decided I’d better not—I’d probably scorch them.) In the comment I left on Deb’s blog, I said that I was getting over my pissed-off mood and transitioning into my I’m-gonna-get-this-cake-right-if-it’s-the-last-thing-I-do mood.

I have approximately one cup of pecans left. Think I can do it?

Now, that same afternoon, back in the beginning before the screaming episode and when I was still humming to myself and stumbling gently over the little people that were stuck in my armpits, I started a batch of butterscotch ice cream. I like to multi-task. I also apparently like to multi-fail, because I scorched the butterscotch.

My humming stopped. I dumped the syrup into the compost (lucky chickens), washed out the kettle and, with lips pressed tight together, remade the butterscotch. The second time it turned out fine, but by then I was starting to toss out pecans like they were a penny a pound so I didn’t fully appreciate my little victory.

Sweetsie was still around when it came time to temper the egg yolks for the custard, and she cheerfully held the bowl steady as I whisked in the warmed cream, but she was long gone by the time I was straining the ice cream mixture into a small bowl set down in a bigger bowl filled with ice cubes. My hands were trembling as I poured the cold water over the ice to chill the cream, and when I finally lifted the chilled bowl of cream, hands still shaky and nerves shot, a vision of shattered glass and a butterscotch-splattered floor flitted before my eyes. (Try saying that last line five times fast.)

This vision of broken glass, lost food, and wasted time did not come out of nowhere. Last spring when my aunt and my mother were coming to visit, I dropped a half-gallon jar of chilled caramel custard (twelve egg yolks) on our tile floor. I took one look at the mess and backed away silently, they quietly turned and stumbled out of the kitchen, face pale and eyes vacant. Mr. Handsome cleaned up the mess.

But I didn’t drop the bowl this time, and after supper Mr. Handsome cranked the ice cream (while I communed with my computer, upstairs in my quiet bedroom) for our after-kids-are-in-bed snack. Then, while he stayed up to pay bills and listen to Obama’s address, I climbed the stairs and crawled under the covers, both defeated and victorious, and most definitely tired.

This afternoon things are looking up. I had a little scoop of the butterscotch ice cream, my extremities have ceased twitching, the kids are outside playing in the sunshine, and I think I may be ready to try that cake again soon.

Butterscotch Ice Cream
Adapted from Deb’s recipe at The Smitten Kitchen

I browsed a variety of websites before I made this ice cream, reading up on different recipes and techniques, and I learned that if you add a bit of alcohol to your ice cream (the alcohol in real vanilla will probably be enough to do the trick), it will stay soft for weeks instead of just a day or two. This recipe calls for two teaspoons of bourbon, and while I was concerned that the flavor would dominate, I do not taste the alcohol at all (and neither my children nor my husband complained). I also learned that you can prevent freezer burn by pressing a piece of plastic wrap over the top of your ice cream before you put a lid on the container.

The texture of this ice cream is ideal: firm, while at the same time softly scoop-able.

Oh, and one more thing: the difference between butterscotch and caramel is that caramel is made from white sugar while butterscotch is made from brown. (Does that mean that Grandma Baer’s popcorn recipe should actually be called “Butterscotch Popcorn”?)

1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons bourbon
3 ½ cups cream, divided
6 egg yolks

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and then add the brown sugar, stirring until the sugar has melted and the mixture is bubbly. Deb said this would take about four minutes, but I found it took longer. Whatever you do, be careful! If it smells burned, throw it out and start over; hopefully you won’t have to do it more than twice.

Remove the sugar-butter mixture from the heat and stir in one-half cup of cream. The syrup will bubble up and steam violently and you’ll singe your knuckles and yell, but it will all be okay. Keep stirring until the cream has been incorporated. (I still had a few lumps in my butterscotch, so I simply poured the syrup through a strainer to get rid of them.) Stir in the vanilla and bourbon and set aside.

In another saucepan, heat the remaining three cups of cream. Put the egg yolks in a small mixing bowl and break them up with a fork. Slowly add about a half-cup of the warmed cream to the yolks, stirring constantly. Then, gradually add the tempered yolks to the warm cream, stirring constantly. Heat the custard, still stirring, till it has thickened slightly and coats the back of the spoon. Do not boil.

Strain the custard into a bowl and place the bowl in an ice-water bath. Stir in the butterscotch. Occasionally stir the mixture as it cools, adding more ice as needed. Refrigerate the butterscotch cream until thoroughly chilled.

Freeze in an ice cream maker.

This morning the Baby Nickel dusted my hallway and bedroom with Gold Bond Powder, à la Amelia Bedelia.

I reacted accordingly, à la Mrs. Rogers.

He didn’t even have a lemon meringue pie in the oven! I don’t know what he was thinking.

I still love him anyway. I think.

(Okay, okay, I’m sure.)

Not only did Grandma Baer, my mother’s mother, tell engrossing stories (here she regales Yo-Yo and Miss Becca Boo with some old-timey tale—probably the one about Johnny, the little boy who refused to eat his milk and bread),

she also made fabulous caramel popcorn. Each October she would make several batches of the popcorn, divide it up into small zip-lock bags, and hand it out to the trick-or-treaters that ventured down her driveway that wound through the woods and separated her ranch house from the road.

Even though my plain Mennonite grandmother handed out sweets to her disguised neighbor children, my own mother didn’t let me or my brothers celebrate Halloween. We weren’t allowed to go trick-or-treating, and more often then not we didn’t even hand out treats. One year we did hand out apples, and when one little neighbor girl reported back to me that her mother made her throw out the apple we gave them because it might have contained a razor, my mother was miffed. What good was a holiday that made people distrustful of others? (That was the same neighbor girl who ate a raw egg for twenty-five cents, on a dare that my mother gave her, an incident not at all connected with the imagined razor event—my mother is not a vengeful woman.) Instead, come the hallowed eve, we hunkered down in our dimly lit house, porch lights off, doing our best to give the impression that we weren’t home. Or we’d go visit friends.

However, despite my mother’s abhorrence of the holiday, one year she did permit us to go trick-or-treating, but just to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I have a vague memory of my brothers and I standing on the concrete stoop outside Grandma’s front door, our only costume the brown paper bags (with cutout holes for our eyes and mouths) jammed down over our heads. When Grandpa opened the door, Grandma declared heartily, “Well, well! What have we here!” We scampered past them into the foyer where we traded our brown bag heads for the role of popcorn dispenser, shyly handing the bags of popcorn to the witches and princesses that rang their doorbell.

Grandma continued her popcorn giving tradition even after Grandpa died and she had moved into a condominium. She collected pretty tins from the thrift store where she volunteered, and at Christmastime she filled the tins with her popcorn and handed them out to all the family—the singles and college students received the smaller tins and the families received the larger tins.

Sometimes my mother, aunts, and I got a bit possessive over the tins, trying to lay claim to the prettiest ones. The last year Grandma handed out the popcorn, I received this tin (or did I filch it from someone else?), and though my aunt tried, she couldn’t convince me to relinquish it. Now it sits atop the hutch, holding my sparse collection of sewing tools.

The first Christmas after our wedding, Mr. Handsome and I followed Grandma’s example and made numerous batches of caramel popcorn for hostess gifts. We bought several of the huge Christmas tins from Wal-mart, the kind that comes filled with three different kinds of chemical-laced popcorn—cheese, caramel, and plain—dumped their contents in the trash, washed the tins, and then refilled them with our own caramel popcorn. Even though it was a labor intensive gift, it provided many sweet snitching opportunities along with the mountains of sticky kettles and pans, so we didn’t fuss too much.

It is a cold and blustery Sunday afternoon and the children, cheeks aflame and noses streaming, are coming back inside after helping Mr. Handsome clean up the back field. While they were outside, I had munched through multiple bowls of the popcorn and finally, in an effort to maintain some semblance of self-control, had divvied out the last of the popcorn into bowls, reserving it for the children. Now, when the kids spy the bowls, they squeal with delight, snatch them up, and head straight for the fireplace, shucking coats and boots as they go.

“Can we have more after we finish this?” they ask.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s all gone.”

“What happened to it?” they persist.

“Um, I ate it.” I smile pleasantly in an attempt to convince them that I had every right to eat more than my share (cooks privileges, you know). They heave grumbly sighs in my general direction, but their mouths are too pleasantly full to do any serious complaining.

As they finish, they bring their bowls back to the kitchen to deposit on the counter. I’m hunched at the computer typing all this up when Yo-Yo’s friend bluntly says, “Too bad you ate it all.”

I pretend to ignore him, but I think to myself, Yep, too bad, Sonny Boy. I want more, too.

Apparently, it doesn’t matter how little or how much of this popcorn you were able to consume—it always appears to be a nasty trick when this sweet treat is all gone.

Grandma Baer’s Caramel Popcorn

Recipe update, November 16, 2011: for extra delicious popcorn, decrease the amount of popcorn from 6 quarts to 5, and increase the butter by 2 tablespoons. Wow.

3/4 cup (12 tablespoons) butter
2 cups brown sugar
½ cup light corn syrup
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
6 quarts popped popcorn, unsalted and unbuttered
2 cups peanuts (optional)

Place the popcorn in a large mixing bowl and sprinkle the nuts (if using) on top. Do not stir. (The nuts have a better chance of getting coated with the caramel if you start out with them on top.)

Put the butter, brown sugar, corn syrup, and baking soda in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly, and then lower the heat until the mixture stays at a steady boil (more than a simmer, less than a rolling boil). Continue to stir constantly.

After five minutes of a steady gentle boil, remove the caramel from the heat, add the salt and vanilla, and stir well. Working quickly, drizzle the caramel over the popcorn,

tossing to coat as much popcorn as possible.

Divide the popcorn between two large, greased cookie sheets or glass 9 x 13 pans (one of my cookie sheets was too thin, so I tragically scorched half of the popcorn—next time I’ll be using the glass pans), and then hand over the sticky-bottomed mixing bowl and spoon to any children you may have hovering nearby.

Bake the pans of caramel popcorn at 250 degrees for one hour, stirring every fifteen minutes. Cool completely before storing in an airtight container.