Someone Enroll me in Culinary Skool Please!

Or order me the Food Channel...

In a sad attempt to make something for our mandated holiday baking schedule at work, which practically came out concurrently with the month-end process schedule, I went to Dominion today to buy some ingredients. I had to work late, so didn't have too much time to make anything from 'scratch' (i.e. Betty Crocker cake mixes). I saw a quick recipe to make petit fours, which is pretty much cake covered in fondant, or chocolate. It didn't even require me to bake a cake - I could just use a..pre-baked cake. Hee hee. This is all I had to do:

1. Buy ingredients - chocolate wafers, pound cake, decorative yummies
2. Melt chocolate in microwave. Yes, no pots, no oven!
3. Cut cake into squares.
4. Pour melted chocolate over cake.
5. Decorate when dry.

So this is what happened:

1. Buy ingredients - I went to 24 hour Dominion to get ingredients; over-bought - wow, cost me a lot. They didn't have pound cake. So I drove to Food Basics - no pound cake. I drove up to Hwy 7 and McCowan to 24hr Loblwas - no pound cake. Okay - substitutes..marble cake for pound cake (lesson 1 - never substitute..you'll see why). So it's like 10:45pm. I head home. Eat dinner that mom made for me (yes, I'm a spoiled brat) and making these easy petit fours.

2. Melt the Chocolate in the Microwave. Microwaves don't like me. They never have - just ask my small group, who knows that I need to buy a box of 3-pack popping corn just to end up with one non-carbonized bag of pop corn. The chocolate goes in for 2 minutes in the microwave (that was just a random time I chose), and so I get a little bored waiting for it and run upstairs to check my email. I come back down and it STUNK! The microwave was clouded over - so i open it and smoke came out; there was a fizzling burn spot in the chocolate and the kitchen started to smell and the smoke was spreading in the kitchen.

My brother comes home and starts making a ruckus - "What the heck are you doing? it stinks in this house!" Meanwhile, my dad comes up from the basement and while coming up he shouts - "What's going on??" and my brother thought it would be funny to tell him: "Fire" in Chinese. So my dad starts running up the stairs and trips on a step. No worries, it was a little trip, not enough to hurt at all, but just enough to piss him off. My brother - "Oh I was joking". Dad: "What kind of a joke is that? Annetaah - what are you doing? Do you need mom to help you??" Anita: "No, I'm just microwaving" Brother: "Why didn't you just buy something? This is so dumb. You probably spent a lot of money buying all these ingredients!!" Anita, defensively lying: "NO! I didn't"

3. Cut cake in squares. Okay, well I didn't really screw this part up. But, while cutting, I realized why pound cake was the preferred choice - the marble cake was more crumbly, whereas the pound cake is very dense. So I shake off the crumbs as much as possible.

4. Pour melted chocolate over cake: Okay, so the internet was helpful in showing me how to do this - hold a fork with the cake over the bowl, pour chocolate over cake. Sure, this would take 30 mins tops! I'll make it to bed by 12am, my newly set curfew. While pouring the chocolate, I again realized why pound cake and not marble cake...the additional crumbs were now getting into the chocolate mixture. So I figured, ahh, should be okay....the crumbs are little and will just add...texture to the chocolate covering....:P so it was taking me a long long time to do this, and I forgot that the chocolate will harden after it cools down. So near the end of the batch of chocolate, those pieces looked really gross, because it was now covered in a chocolate/cake crumb mixture and it was looking real thick cuz the chocolate was hardening. Eventually I went through 3 batches of chocolate to cover the cake pieces.

5. Decorate - yeah, this was the only part I liked cuz I got to make it pretty. Sorry, pretty wouldn't be an adjective relevant to this whole baking, well I can't even call it baking...food preparation attempt.

So I hope that no one eats them tomorrow, because they'll probably get a tummy-ache. But at least, they can log me in SAP's Human Resource Workflow module as having completed my 'Holiday baking' contribution to the group.

hee hee sarcasm aside, the baking thing is actually a nice way to talk to people and share with them something about yourself. In this case, people at work will now know that I can't bake.

Goodnight!

anita