Crater Cream

I don't know what it is about ice cream that makes it such an amazing invention, but it is provided that it is taken care of properly. Proper ice cream care is a lost art in many families and I will fight with all my strength to ensure that my family treats ice cream with the respect it deserves. 

You can imagine my shock, then, last night when I went to get a scoop of Bryer's Chocolate from the carton my wife had just bought earlier in the day and I discovered that one simple rule of ice cream etiquette had been violated. I knew that the kids had already dug into the ice cream, but I didn't realize that they had mutilated it so badly until I opened the lid and saw the crater. You don't dig a crater in the middle of the carton when you scoop ice cream. You take thin layers off the top, ensuring that after each scoop a smooth, even surface remains on the top of the carton. That's why they call it ice cream. Ice is smooth and as long as the ice cream is in the carton, it should stay smooth. 

If it was supposed to have one deep, lonely hole straight down the middle, they would have called it crater cream, but they didn't. There's only one way to truly fix a crater properly and that involves removing large amounts of ice cream in layers until the surface reaches the same level as the crater, thus enabling the scooper to return the carton to its originally intended state. Now in order to do that, all the ice cream that is removed must be put somewhere. Since the kids were in bed and they had already destroyed the carton anyway and my wife wasn't planning on having any, that put the entire burden on me to find a suitable storage location for the removed ice cream. 

If I stored the removed ice cream in a separate container, I wouldn't have been able to achieve the desired level of smoothness in that container without first melting the ice cream and further ruining it. That left me only one choice really. With my ice cream scooper positioned at precisely a 65 degree angle, I started scraping the top layer of the non-cratered portion of the carton. Once my scoop was perfectly full, I removed it and squeezed the handle until the round ball of dessert fell into my bowl. I repeated this process several times, each time ensuring that I was scraping an even layer off the top. 

Soon my bowl was overflowing, and yet, the crater remained. I knew that was all I should eat for one night, so as much as it pained me, I had to concede my defeat, though it will only be for a short time. For tonight, I shall return to the devastated carton and resume my careful healing of its wounded spirit as a meticulously remove layer upon layer until the crater is minimized and the smooth, creamy surface of my Bryer's ice cream can again be appreciated by the world.