Banana Pudding for a Crowd

We made 210 banana pudding cups at girls camp.  We had in our possession a great recipe - one that had already been tried and tested on teenagers so we knew the girls would love it.  We learned, however, that just because you can multiply a great family recipe by 27 doesn't mean that it's a good idea.  

Rule #1:  Make sure you have the proper equipment for making your recipe.

If we had had one of these (the Hobart mixer, not the kid),

 
maybe we could have avoided this messy lumpiness.

Trying to fold nine pounds of not-so-softened cream cheese into gallons of vanilla pudding (along with 27 cans of sweet and condensed milk and 27 16-ounce containers of Cool Whip) makes for good stories later, but it also makes for a very lumpy banana pudding.  Later you get comments like, "What were those interesting little chunks in the pudding?"

Rule #2:  Never buy green bananas thinking that they'll ripen in three days when you need them.

When we did our Costco run the morning of the first day of camp, every single banana at Costco was green like this:

[source]

I rarely buy green bananas.  But when I do, it seems like they always turn yellow and spotty way before I want them to.  We decided it was safe to go ahead and buy the bananas.  Well, our Costco bananas turned out to be a stubborn bunch.  They refused to ripen.  

We coaxed them and pleaded with them for a day.  When they didn't respond to our niceties, we had to resort to bananacide.  We stuffed them all into the only brown grocery bag we could find, with hopes that their ethylene gas fumes would hasten their metamorphosis into becoming the perfect bananas for banana pudding.  Our attempts were in vain.  

We ended up packing up those green bananas at the end of camp and taking them back home with us.  I think I actually heard muffled laughter coming from that brown grocery bag on the trip home.