Oh the adventures of cooking in the Barnett house!!

So my mom had to try out a Baked Alaska recipe for sunday school this week. We figured, "hey, baked alaska.... can't be too hard. Pound cake, ice cream, and meringue." We even decided to just buy the pound cake and the ice cream, so all we had to make was the meringue. But the catch was that the recipe for the meringue was totally different. The first time we made it the meringue was too watery and slid right off the top of the ice cream. So, it looked horrible, but tasted fine. The second attempt we used a different recipe, and it looked great and baked wonderfully. It looked so amazing when we took it out of the oven. But something went wrong with the meringue and it tasted so bitter. My sister's fiance thought it tasted like lemon meringue. But oh no, there was no lemon anywhere to be found.
So we tried a third time. This time a completely different recipe. No cream of tarter, more sugar, and less vanilla. Surely this one would work. Again, it looked great, and it didn't taste AS bad. But still something about it wasn't right. Turns out it was the vanilla. Who knew vanilla could go bad, but apparently it does. The first recipe tasted good because it had no vanilla. So now we've got the recipe down and the Baked Alaska is ready to go for next Sunday. Hopefully nothing like our experience will happen for the kids in Sunday School.