Out of control

I have no sense of portion control. Yes I can control it when it's on my plate and I'm actually eating it, it's the making it that is my problem. I can never seem to estimate how much food to make and as a habit, I usually make ten times too much or make something way too big. No matter if it's the simplest recipe ever or incredibly complex and time consuming, a recipe I made up myself, or one I found on the internet... it will be too much. Here are two recent examples.

First example is this new cake recipe I tried out. It's ridiculously easy. You stack these chocolate wafers up with fresh homemade whipped cream and let it sit for a day and ta-da! Cake! It looks a little different than this by the time you eat it. (Seriously though you should all try it, I'm in love with this cake. I got the recipe from the Smitten Kitchen.) I tried it out and made it for book club ...and then a smaller one to taste before in case it was bad and didn't want to serve it ...and then some mini ones which I brought to work... see what I'm saying? There was just so much stuff, I had tons left over after I assembled the cake so I had to keep going. I ate the cake for 3 days then finally had to pass it off onto a family in my neighborhood that has 6 kids before it went bad. There was still over half the cake left.

Second example, I wanted to make some manicotti to put in the freezer for later. I pulled out my tasty manicotti recipe that I concocted a few years back and spent all evening chopping, grating, boiling, sauteing till I had the most enormous bowl of manicotti stuffing I'd ever seen. (look at the ingredients list in the background. This is one involved recipe! If only I'd paid attention to the amounts I'd written down I might not have had this problem) "What have I done?!?!" I thought as I began boiling a second box of manicotti shells to stuff. It didn't end there. What I wanted to be one tray of manicotti turned into two trays, another square pan, a loaf pan, and then a large casserole dish of ziti mixed in with all the left over filling I still had. How many people did I think I was feeding? This picture is about half of how much food I made. Maybe I should be running a food bank or get a job as a cafeteria lunch lady or something... It's a good thing I like my own cooking because I sure end up with leftovers a lot. (and I didn't even mention the enchiladas I made the next day. They're filling up the other half of the freezer that isn't full of manicotti)