How much frosting is too much frosting? Some might view the question itself as ridiculous. Frosting is delicious, you might be thinking, therefore the limit does not exist. Well, up until this morning, I might have agreed with you. But today, I watched a woman on TikTok accidentally buy 13 pounds of vanilla whipped icing and it turns out that is, in fact, too much.
“Kate,” who posts on TikTok as @bloomsandbakeskate, recently shared a post of her walking through a big box store.
“I’m going to throw up right now,” she laughs nervously as the video begins. “I’m at Sam’s Club and I went to the bakery. I said ‘Do you guys sell just the icing or frosting for a cake?” Kate was informed that they did, indeed, sell whipped icing and buttercream in tubs. Perfect! Exactly what she needed… or was it…?
“This is what she put in my cart,” Kate continued, revealing about a five-gallon vat of icing. “Like, this is a full cat litter-sized thing! I have too much social anxiety to be like ‘Oh, never mind. I didn’t realize it was 45 pounds.’ How much do you think this is going to cost?”
Ditching it in the store? Not really an option since the icing inside was frozen (sidebar: a five-gallon tub of frozen icing feels like you should need some sort of background check to buy it because that’s a damn weapon).
The video ends there, but fortunately, there’s a follow-up to answer our most pressing questions…
I won’t lie: I was sort of expecting more to happen once the icing after Kate bought it. I mean, tell me this doesn’t sound like a Seinfeld B-plot. Like, George accidentally buys too much icing and then Kramer decides to use it in some sort of scheme that ultimately falls apart? But real life, it turns out, is much more low-key.
Kate explains that the tub, which she did indeed buy, was 13 pounds (not the hyperbolic 45). “For everyone dying to know the price, this was $28.46, which honestly, I didn’t think was that bad. I was thinking it was going to be around fifty bucks or more.”
Same. Particularly when you think about the fact that a 16-ounce container you can buy in a grocery store is about $2, which at the same price per pint would put this tub at about $80.
Still: the size of it all.
“To everyone saying ‘It’s Sam’s Club, what did you expect?’ I expected, like, a big gallon ice cream-sized container,” Kate explains. Maybe even two gallons. Because I’ve gotten many food items at Sam’s Club and never have they ever been handed to me in a five-gallon bucket.”
Fortunately, she was able to divvy up some of the frosting into smaller batches and re-freeze them. Moreover, the icing worked well for the project she bought it for in the first place; a beautifully decorated floral cake for her mom’s birthday. Nevertheless, the cake was pretty small, so there’s still a whole lot of frosting to deal with and most of the tub is still taking up space in her freezer, and the cupcakes she plans to make to bring into work will only burn through so much…
“If you have any ideas for what I can do with twelve-and-a-half pounds of frosting,” she says to conclude her video, “let me know.”
A humble suggestion: remember how Scrooge McDuck would swim in a vault full of coins in Duck Tales? That, but vanilla frosting. Just promise me you’ll think about it…
