Ok, I am super dense. I LOVE my new Vitamix and have made all sorts of fun things with it: ice cream, fruit and green smoothies, tortilla soup, broccoli potato soup.
It has made me realize however how truly dumb I am. Guess what Cream of Wheat is? Wheat, creamed or chopped up. Duh. (delicious, by the way)
In looking through the cookbooks that came with the mixer I found a highly complicated one for Powdered Sugar. Guess how you make this- you powder sugar, or blend it. Crazy! Just 30 seconds in the Vitamix and wow, powdered sugar. I Googled it and it looks like you could make it in a regular blender as well. Some people say to add a bit of cornstarch to keep it from clumping.
It got me wondering about cost. A pound of powdered sugar is 3 3/4 cups, and 2 1/4 cups of granulated sugar makes a pound of powdered.
You're doing pretty good to get 2 pounds of powdered sugar for $1.25, or $.63/lb. A 5 lb bag of granulated sugar runs about $2.50 on sale, or $.50/lb.
So 1 pound (2 1/4 cups) of granulated sugar makes 1 pound (3 3/4) of powdered sugar. Again, duh. 1 pound = 1 pound. I won't tell you how long it took me to arrive at that genius statement. Wow. Impressive math skills, eh?
This is all very good for me to realize. It is cheaper to make my own powdered sugar, especially if I can get sugar for cheaper than $.50/lb.
It also made me wonder if you could make brown sugar. Well, yes you can! Cool! Matt, the resourceful man he is, googled that and we discovered you use 1 cup granulated sugar and mix in by hand 1-2 Tbsp of molasses. That's it! Homemade brown sugar!
Have you ever made either of these? We did the powdered sugar today and it was super fun.
I've made my own brown sugar before with some success. The first time I added too much molasses and it made the recipe taste different and not in a good way. The second time I was sparing on the molasses and it worked fine.
ReplyDeleteI've made my own brown sugar in a pinch when I discovered I was out of brown sugar right in the middle of something--I didn't actually mix it all up, just substituted x amt of sugar and added a couple of tablespoons of sugar. I never really thought about making it up in advance. And wow, didn't realize that I could make powdered sugar. No vitamix, but I may try it in my blender. Good idea!
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