My Bru-Ha-Ha With the Doughboy

We love those Pillsbury® crescent rolls that come in a cardboard tube with metal caps on the ends. That little Pillsbury® Doughboy looks so cute in his white baking hat and jacket with his little fingerless except for a thumb hand. He seems so darn happy and friendly. You just pull the paper strip by the silver foil tab at the triangle arrow along the seam of the roll, press a spoon along the seam, the cardboard pops open and you’re ready to roll up the dough according to the directions and bake the rolls.

I began by pre-heating the oven, getting out the cookie sheet, retrieving the tube of crescent rolls from the refrigerator, and reading all the instructions again to make sure I knew what I was doing.  Baking these rolls is usually Scott's job. This is where the trouble began; I needed to locate the magnifying glass so I could find and read the part that instructed me to remove the wrapper “here.” That part of the label, which seems to be very important so I’d know how to open the tube and get the rolls, is typeset pretty small, miniscule, in fact. Then I had to find the little tiny triangle showing where “here” is. Except for one teeny, tiny little piece none of the label came off so I tried to use a knife to loosen the wrapping hoping I could find the seam and press on it to pop open the tube, wrapper and all. I’ve seen Scott do this and he seemed to manage this method somewhat successfully as long as he was able to use all known swear words and gesture wildly with one of his fingers.

I had a little success because some more of the label came off. I’d pretty much destroyed the part of the wrapper that had the directions, including how long to bake the rolls, and my work with the knife had poked a couple of small holes in the cardboard tube. Very, very slowly some of the dough began to seep out of the tiny little holes. It was looking like we would have to settle for extremely small dinner rolls, not the size or shape of crescents, but more like peas. And at the rate they were seeping out of the tube we wouldn’t be able to have a roll with dinner for hours. I’d probably need to serve them as a tiny side dish in a tiny tea cup.

By now I’d worked myself into a frenzy, had begun sweating profusely, my make-up was running, and my hair was standing on end, so I decided on a new plan; I started to slam the cardboard tube on the kitchen counter repeatedly as hard as I could. I was able to really bang the tube hard because I’ve recently resumed lifting a two pound barbell and know my strength is improving by leaps and bounds. The wrapper still didn’t pop open at the seam. Instead the metal end caps flew off, some of the dough flew out of the can and stuck to the wall, more little pea sized pieces of dough escaped from the holes, and I had to try to shake the remaining dough out of the cardboard tube, which still hadn’t split open. I could see Doughboy not only laughing at me, but gesturing at me with that one fat, little white thumb he has. I don’t think he was gesturing a thumbs up, either.

I knew in an ideal world I’d have one sheet of dough, perforated so I could make 8 triangles and roll those 8 pieces loosely into perfect crescent shapes. Instead, I had about 18 pea sized dough balls, about 5 discs shaped like vanilla wafers, and a few mounds of semi-perforated dough that I shaped into golf ball sized rolls and a couple of free-form artistic creations. I swear Doughboy was chuckling his baker’s hat head off and muttering unfortunate swear words he’d learned from Scott under his breath.

With nothing to lose at this point, I arranged the dough as best as I could on the cookie sheet, took another glance at Doughboy, pressed the dough down onto the baking sheet firmly with the middle finger of my right hand, smirked at Doughboy, and shoved the rolls into the oven. Baking the varied sizes was not entirely successful, but Scott and I each were able to have one total dinner roll made up of several small ones of questionable doneness and shape.

Doughboy was no longer laughing his baker’s hat head off and his swearing and gesturing lost some of its gusto. He was still waving at me with that fat, little white thumb, though.