April's Fool: That Would Be Me

Setting: I'm driving down the road on a Monday evening, trying desperately not to fly off the most pot-hole ridden street in Houston. I'm listening to NPR and decided that I am going to blow my head off if I heard just ONE more story about civil unrest or natural disasters. (I get it, it's a bad situation over there. Can we just have one other story type or must my entire 2 hours of commute each day be this: tsunami, earthquake, Libya, nuclear meltdown, Egypt, Gaddafi, nuclear power, Libya, Libya, Ivory Coast, Rick Perry dicking over education and making a lot of racist comments, Libya, Libya.)

*Suddenly my phone rings*
(So weird, my phone just rang as I finished typing that)

It's my lovely husband. He has come into a possible barter situation with some high end baking tins for muffins. He said that our buddy Patterson was in possession of said tins and was willing to barter for Rock-o-liscious Peanut Butter Cups.




A far better picture of Patterson than my earlier portrait.


Jon asked me what a fair barter was for the tins. He started at 6 dozen PB cups.

That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that would be the equivalent of 36 packages of the store bought Reese's. That's a package a week for most of a year.

I get a little dizzy. That is a lot of work. I waver. Do I really want these tins THAT bad? In a shaky voice, I tell Jon that I feel that number might be a little high. Would Patterson settle for a smaller number? We proceed to seriously barter for the next 5 minutes until we agree on 4 dozen. I still feel a little shafted, but I detour to the poor-people grocery store for chocolate.

At the store, I found a few bricks of bulk melting chocolate for a reasonable price for the very first time. I carefully read the package to see if it was the dreaded milk chocolate that would cause problems noted in previous posts. Although it had some different ingredients than the baker's chocolate, I got it anyway to save time and money. A one pound brick of  bulk chocolate was the same price as a half pound brick of the Baker's chocolate.

Yes, I like my chocolate with Jack...

I drag ass out of the store, get home, cook dinner, then set to work cranking out candy. I started melting the bulk chocolate, which, by the way, melted horribly like the milk chocolate did for some reason. After about a dozen are complete, Jon stepped in to start helping. He sweetly started me a second pb ball, and started chopping the second brick to melt. After awhile, he steps out to go watch the NCAA Championship Game. I put two completed muffin tins of candy in the fridge to harden.

Jon stepped back in a few minutes later to help me finish of the 3rd and 4th dozen. I sigh with exhaustion. Then, Jon asked if I could make him a special one (read extra fat with 2 layers of peanut butter and chocolate.) I told him I would, except there was a slight problem: we were coming up a little short on chocolate for the 4th dozen. We were about 5 cups shy. He told me that was OK and not to worry about making the full dozen, that we would just stop when we ran out of chocolate.

I got upset because that meant I would have to, at some point, pay Patterson the additional 5 or so cups I owed him. This meant another trip to the store, and another evening making a mess of the kitchen. Jon seems oblivious to why I am upset despite my whining clearly thought out communication. Then he  begins to realize why I'm so upset when I say, "I am almost to the 4 dozen, I just want to finish them out with whatever chocolate we have in the cabinet."

Jon: *blank stare* Four dozen?
Me: Yea, you said Patterson wanted 4 dozen for the tins.
Jon: Yea, but you only have half a dozen here and 1 dozen in the fridge. You're not even close to 4 dozen.
Me: Umm... open the fridge

The only food in our fridge

Jon: Oh my...
Me: What?
Jon: I was only joking about the 4 dozen. You couldn't tell?
Me: EXCUSE ME?
Jon: I was only joking about that number, you just had to make a few for Patterson. I didn't honestly mean for you to make a whole 4 dozen.
Me: *facepalm*

*On a side note, I am now the proud owner of 2 restaurant quality muffin tins. Jon took some of the cups to Patterson at work today. Here is Patterson's response: "These are better than Reese’s!  They’re hearty like they’re full of sustenance.  You should sell give me some of them around Christmas."

Keep dreaming Patterson, you should have enough to last you until about Christmas if you only eat 2 a week, for the rest of the year.

My new pans

A Sad Day in Cupcake Land

Jon and I didn't do Valentine's Day this year. It's a corporate holiday dreamed up to increase chocolate sales around the Great Depression, and we figured, meh, we just got married. That's love enough...for now.

However, I stumbled across a Food Network Magazine at the office with a recipe that I just HAD to try. I nicked the page from the magazine and dashed home with euphoric, klepto-like glee.

The recipe is for homemade chocolate mini cupcakes, frosted with peanut butter icing, dipped in a chocolate ganache. My heart was all a flutter. When I saw this recipe, I felt like this:

Everything in the world is MAGICAL!

I should have known this was going to be a fail from the very beginning, but I was blinded by cupcake glee. Every time I encountered a warning sign that should have signified that this recipe was doomed to fail, I am going to write it in red. For example, I seriously had to go to the store on three different to get all the ingredients. Two of those three trips were to Wal-mart. Even checking out at the register at Wal-mart with these ingredients was a hassle. They just wouldn't scan, and the cashier, for some odd reason, could not properly type in the UPC code. Seriously.

The Sunday before Valentine's Day was going to be the last time that I will be cooking for awhile because Jon and I are going heading to the in-laws every weekend to help with the family business. Yea. Now was the time to cook, and there was no going back. I plowed mixed forward.

With my mise en place rockin', I started making the cupcakes. I must have gone over the directions 500 times with OCD-like precision to make sure every single step was right. I chopped about 900 different types of chocolate:



Chop Chop Chop!

Then I had to scald some heavy cream. After the cream is scalded, you are supposed to pour it over some peanut butter chips, let it sit for a few minutes, and then mix into a smooth paste for frosting. Scalding cream is really no big thing, that is unless your oven coils will not nest flat into the stove. After my pot sat on high for quite awhile without a boil, I began to wonder what was going on. After closer examination, my stove's knobs looked a little funny. Here's what I think happened: The stove's original knob got broken off by a previous tenant, so the landlord went to the hardware store and bought the first stove knob he could find. What he failed to notice during installation is that this knob is the opposite of all the other stove knobs. (i.e. this one has the HI setting on the opposite side of the dial than the other three burner knobs. So that means when this burner says HI when the temperature is actually on LO and vice versa. My hovel gets ghetto-er by the minute.

While the peanut butter set, I went to filling cupcakes sleeves. The batter was dark, rich, and absolutely fabulous. However, it was so thick, it was difficult to get it off the spoon into the muffin cups. I made a huge mess, but that was no surprise really. The real surprise came when I filled up 36 muffin cups, realizing that the recipe was only supposed to make 24 cupcakes. I put the first 24 in the oven and set the timer.

Afterward, I went to work smoothing the PB chips. I only had a shallow bowl left to mix in. I pulled out the hand mixer and started it on the slowest setting. Peanut Butter Creme Fresh soon splattered all over my kitchen because the bowl was too shallow to use a hand mixer.



You can see splatter on my hand and on the counter there.

This recipe, I swear, took every bowl, whisk, measuring spoon/cup, and spatula I owned. I had to stop 3 times mid-recipe to wash a dish that I needed. I sighed and carried on. I sadly misread that the PB mixture is to go in the freezer to harden after mixing. It was supposed to go in the fridge.  

 

About this time, the timer is going off for the cupcakes. I take out the first batches and put in the second. Something seemed terribly wrong. Jon and I tried a cupcake to see what was up. Guess what we found:

This means that my oven temperature gauge is off as well. I had made 24 mini hockey pucks. Twenty-four f-ing Puck-cakes from scratch. I decide to carfully monitor the remaining 12 to see if they could be salvaged. 

While they were cooking, I had to make a ganache and finish up the PB frosting. The recipe said that I was to mircowave the chocolate pieces with buttermilk for 2 minutes. By now, you should know how I feel about chocolate in the microwave. I started at 30 seconds and pulled my now rock hard PB frosting from the freezer. I pulled the chocolate out of the microwave and was able to ganache it right away. The PB frosting, on the other hand, required an ice-pick to get it out of the bowl. I was supposed to whip it into a fluffy paste, but it only came out as a thick turd log. I piped that shit on the salvaged second batch of cupcakes.

Look kids! Poo cupcakes!

Then came the dipping of the turd-frosted cupcakes into the ganache. Sigh. The frosting didn't really adhere too well to the puck-cakes.  It fell into the ganache bowl and had to be fished out and squished back on. Here is what resulted:

Hockey Puck-cakes with Turd-Burglar Icing Dipped in Diarrhea.  Yummy.

I walked out of the kitchen in disgust, both of my sinks full. My counters were covered in chocolate. Why you ask?

Dripped all over the kitchen.

Since this incident, we have been living on pizza, sandwiches, take-out, and dinner parties at other people's houses. Fuck cooking. I quit.