Whisking cream? I'd better tell the window cleaner.

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The smell of whipped cream

You always know when cream is being whisked to a frenzy in my house.  You can smell it.

This perhaps only confirms to you that I have finally lost whatever plot I related to, because as most of us will be aware, whipped cream smells of not a great deal.  Even at a cream to nose distance it's not noted for any discernible perfume or aroma. No.  I don't mean I can smell the cream, whipped or otherwise, what I can smell is the electric whisk thing with its viscous spinning blades.

It must be years old, this electric hand-held thing and frankly I reckon it's past its best. It's certainly been instrumental in the creation of dozens - maybe hundreds - of pavlovas as a whole battery of eggs has been converted into wispy meringue things.

Anyway, what you could smell in my house is the electric whisk's motor.  This thing is at full whack, the blades lashing through egg whites or cream at full pelt, spinning and spinning and the clapped out motor is getting hotter and hotter and so is my wife as she wrestles with ageing  kitchen appliances.  I don't do pavlovas or any other meringue jobs as a rule.

Now before I go any further, let me say right now that I have a solution to all this. A whisk that does not require mains electricity and is ridiculously fast at its whisking ability.  Off the scale, in fact. More later.

Electric Light work. No, not really.

But for now, back to this electric thing and the smoke alarms are now wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to pounce at any time.  They've just bleeped once to make sure they haven't forgotten what to do in such circumstances, are braced and ready for a damn good bleeping. The kitchen now smells like a mechanics workshop.  You couldn't do this randomly without warning key services such as window cleaners, for example, because the vibration through the glass would constitute a health and safety violation and more than likely action through the civil court as the hapless window operative plummets to the ground.  

Not a laughing matter.  Wobbling and equally ageing double glazing has now taken on all the qualities of those badly designed suspension bridges years ago that turned into huge skipping ropes when the wind topped a gusty 5mph and turned Ford Anglias and Hillman Imps into equally poorly-designed Frisbees.


Any window cleaner that happened to call unannounced as a few egg whites were given a seeing-to could expect to move down his ladder quicker than expected in a froth of suds, buckets and taking a slap from a selection of flapping chamois leathers on the way down to the back garden.  

We wouldn't hear his screams obviously because Ken Bruce is shouting his head off on Radio 2 trying to make himself heard over the phenomenal noise from those damned rotating whisk blades.  The egg whites or cream for that matter after three or four minutes of this onslaught is still a flowing stream of liquidy stuff, refusing point blank to stiffen on command and certainly not while that flipping Adele is wailing from Ken's CD player.  The smoke alarms are beside themselves and on the edge of their seats, willing this to go really badly wrong as they sense what could be smoke coming out of the back of the hand-held mixer.

And still my wife is valiantly holding on to the mixer which has now gathered momentum and spinning around the bowl all by itself, squinting through the noise and now acrid stench coming from the glowing motor. The window cleaner, flat out on the patio, would by now  have now stopped his fruitless attempts at rescue by banging on the patio doors and instead be dragging what's let of him towards the road in front, shedding scraps of chamois leather on the way, in the hope of attracting passing paramedics.

And then, a breakthrough.  Just as the loosened kitchen light fittings were about to abandon the ceiling, the egg whites/cream give up the fight and stiffen to acceptable levels after 20 minutes or so of kitchen carnage. 

All quiet after a cream whisking

Then it's...nothing.  That eerie stillness in the air that I can only imagine is the consequence of a hurricane that's passed by.  All except the radio, of course which is still at 10 on the volume knob blasting out an old Moody Blues standard.

'...Nights in White Satin....'

The ancient electric hand-held whisk is slumped on the kitchen bench, throbbing.

'....Never reaching the end...'

Although the motor stinks to high heaven, no actual smoke appeared from it and so the smoke alarms have retreated sulkily back to their comatose state, bleeping just the once more as if to make a point.

'.....Letters I've written...'

The windows and everything else for that matter, finally calms to a rest.

'....Never meaning to send.'

And yet all this is preventable.  There really is no need  for this level of misery just to create an acceptable pudding/ desert whichever you prefer to call it.  

Pampered Chef Double Balloon Whisk to the rescue

There is a readily available device, as I hinted earlier, that can solve this misery with one flick of its wire frame.  The Double Balloon Whisk. For under fifteen pounds you can help save yourself and others from the ordeal as described.  Now, I'd been told this device by other PCheffers, was a winner and would turn double cream into whipped cream in 10 seconds or less.  Which obviously is ridiculous.  And then I saw a video recorded - I guess - on a phone by Sally, a PCheffer and uploaded to the Facebook thing.  It took seconds.  So I bought the double balloon whisk and a pot of double cream. (Heavy cream, I guess it's called in parts other than the UK).

It's a strange looking thing with the sort of face only a mummy whisk could love.  Apparently although it looks like it might, in truth, be a small mobile phone mast, in fact its thin wires and strange shape is to '...maximise aeration for more whipped cream in less time...'

I whisked away full of enthusiasm and guess what?  It didn't work.  Well it did, that's not true, but it took about a minute or more and I was expecting miracles.  I could simply omit this stuff but I try to be an honest chap - that's what happened.

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All in the wrist action when it comes to whipping cream 

I bought another pot and changed my technique.  With the cream out of the fridge for a little over an hour and poured into a bowl out of the cupboard, I stirred rapidly instead of the up an into the cream whisk action I'd tried before.  Everything about stirring like a spoon seemed wrong.  And for a glimmer the cream was stubbornly liquid.  And then after about 10, maybe fifteen seconds, the clouds parted, the sun shone and the cream thickened visibly.  Transfixed by what I was seeing, I went to around 20 seconds and ended up with a mousse-like cream.

Bizarre.  I shall now try with egg whites to see if the same happens. And more cream to see if it was a fluke. But I see no reason why it would be.  It's just a different technique to the one I'm used to.

Try it my friends.  Embrace the weird wires and get yourself fully aerated and whipped accordingly.

I can think of a few window cleaners that would be very happy if you did.

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P.S  You can always join me in the wonderful world of interactive social media thing, stuff by following me on facebook and twitter: both are mikegetscooking, or even YouTube for goodness sake.  In fact I'd be very pleased if you did and then you'd maybe comment a tad here and there.  Ta ta for now.