Fifth Post

Who am I kidding? Just because my family feels bad for me and tells me I can cook doesn't mean that I actually can. Friends are bad like that: they can tell you exactly what they think about your food without feeling guilty about hurting your feelings. Hey, someone has to smash your ego now and then, can you imagine how stuck up humanity would get if we never failed?

Last friday I held a sleepover at my dad's house. It went how all parties go for me, meaning I had to sneak away and cry when nobody was looking. But that is another story with a problem that has already been solved. For now, at least.

For this party, I made White Chocolate Mousse which was supposed to be served in Chocolate Dessert Cups, Chocolate Pavlova with Milk Chocolate Cream, and Chocolate Waffles for breakfast. I had high hopes that everyone would enjoy these, but even those that seemed edible to me were hated by everyone else. First off, I knew that dipping balloons in chocolate could be a bad idea. I wonder if anyone tested this recipe before printing it. I suspect the cups in the picture were made by different methods. I had melted semi-sweet, milk, and white chocolate chips in three separate double boilers and fondue pots. I inflated several balloons to be about four inches in diameter, washing and drying them because who knows how clean the factory and the child laborers who made them were? About seven balloons popped while being dipped in the milk chocolate, two semi-sweet chocolate covered balloons popped — one while siting on the wax paper, and three white chocolate covered balloons popped on the wax paper. My numbers may be off, but I am not exaggerating. For those balloons that didn't feel obliged to splatter chocolate over the counter tops, the recipe says to place them in the freezer. Our freezer hardly has room for a single chocolate chip, let alone seven chocolate covered four inch latex orbs. So they were left to harden on the counter. The chocolate never hardened, but it did pick up a latex flavor. Yum. Despite the failure of the chocolate cups, I stupidly decided to continue with the white chocolate mousse. Everything seemed to be going fine, I was happy with the taste, and I found some plastic wine glasses to serve them in. I removed the bowl of mousse from the refrigerator where it had been chilling, and began to spoon it into the glasses. It was a little thinner than I was hoping for, and to my distress, it only filled three and a half of the wine glasses. This turned out to be lucky for my friends. They all looked a little nauseous when I offered the glasses, but I managed to convince four into trying it. They hated it. They said it was too sweet for them. They barely touched it. Well, what did I expect?

The next recipe I made was the chocolate pavlova with milk chocolate chip coffee cream. A large meringue with a heavy coffee flavored whipped cream on top. The meringue crumbled a little bit around the edges, but I thought the topping tasted good. I thought wrong. Almost everyone avoided it, probably in part to the mousse that I had fed them earlier.

When I started making the chocolate waffles the next morning they all groaned "No more sugar!". I knew by now that they hated my cooking, but still, I wanted to try to win back their good opinions. My dad had made regular waffles along side of my stupid mess, so my friends boycott of my waffles didn't cause them to starve. They ate all of the good, golden waffles that my dad had made and left a large stack of the dull, brown waffles that I had.

I am glad my friends are honest with me and let me know when my cooking sucks, no matter how much it hurts. They guarded their stomachs from indigestion bravely. I will still go on trying to bake, my grade does rest on it after all. I just won't force others to eat my messes, because just because I find it edible doesn't mean that anyone else can survive a few bites. My revised ratio = 0:18 with failures in the lead.