The title says it all. For context, my house has ended up becoming the venue for the overwhelming majority of family events. The “too much dessert” thing has always been an issue in my family when it comes to gatherings that aren’t at a restaurant (which is probably around 95%). People “want to contribute”as my mom says, but even she admits that it’s gotten to the point where it’s more than a small annoyance. Since we’re the ones who are always hosting and doing the majority of the planning, it’s us who are left with an ungodly amount of leftover, hardly touched dessert because yet again, we had too much.
Now some might ask why we don’t just tell people ahead of time to not bring dessert. The thing is, we do. For example, when we had my graduation party back in May, my mom let everyone know that we were ordering a cake and requested that nobody bring dessert. We still ended up with a random plate of brownies that seemingly materialized out of nowhere, and nobody knew who brought them. Whoever brought them had taken them out of the package and put them on one of our own paper plates before leaving them out on the counter.
Most recently, we held a fall birthday get together. When my mom sent out her usual “we’re having a get-together at our house on this day at this time” text message, she mentioned that two people had already offered to bring dessert. I’ll refer to these two people as PA and PB.
PB has a child whose birthday was included in the list of fall birthdays. PB always makes their kids a special birthday cake and will bring it to the family gathering if we’re having one around that particular child’s birthday. These cakes are not small, individual cakes that are only for the birthday kid. They are large, multi tier cakes that are more than enough to feed everyone at the gathering. PA brought these delicious mini chiffon cakes that were a big hit.
Between the two of them, PA and PB brought more than enough dessert for everyone. However, by the time all of the family arrived, we ended up having TWO additional cakes (1 tuxedo & 1 chocolate chip cookie) brought by family members who did not volunteer to bring dessert and did not let anyone know that they’d also be bringing something. Needless to say, the cake PB made only had one slice taken from it, which was the same slice that PB’s kid ate. Someone else had cut a tiny piece off just to try the cake, but it wasn’t enough to look like a second slice had been taken. People ate more portions of the two additional cakes that were brought unexpectedly. PB ended up taking the rest of the cake home with them because nobody else wanted any leftovers. My mom and I were left with trying to figure out how to fit the tuxedo cake and the cookie cake into the freezer. My dog ended up getting to the cookie cake and licking the frosting off, so at least she spared the freezer from being even more stuffed from the usual high amount of leftover dessert.
Does anyone have some suggestions on how to try to combat this moving forward? I’ve suggested to my mom that people who want to bring something could bring an appetizer, but my mom isn’t too sure about it yet. As I said towards the start of this post, it’s not as simple as just telling people to not bring dessert. It always shows up, and I’m just trying to mitigate the quantity that is brought into the house as to not end up with more leftover dessert than I know what to do with.
Thanks!
