Archives: Why I don't cook at home very often

~~ Originally posted as a Facebook Note on October 6, 2009 ~~

She wanted to help, how cute is that?

Alright, so if making the world's scariest ladybug in cake wasn't bad enough of a disaster in my kitchen, enter dumb move number two - making homemade chicken nuggets with a toddler and an Oscar at your feet.

First, things are going okay. Jocelyn starts playing in the cabinet I just pulled a baking sheet out of, but that's par for the course. The silicone cake pans will get on the floor, but that's no big deal. She's happy and entertained.

I get my breading assembly line ready. A bowl of flour, a bowl of beaten eggs, and a bowl of Panko bread crumbs. I cut the chicken, making sure I only touch the chicken with one hand so that I have a salmonella-free hand available in case the phone rings or if Jocelyn decides she needs to get into something she shouldn't.

While I get ready to bread chicken, I hear her clanging in the drawer at my feet with all the frying pans and lids in it. I glance down and she's taken them all out of the drawer, and replaced them with herself. It's too cute, I can't say anything. I want to get my camera, but my left hand is an ooey-gooey-salmonella-laced mess, so that's not happening. So, I get back to breading. But alas, I manage to bump the bowl with eggs and they go all over the place, just narrowly missing Jocelyn's head. I start cleaning it up, but don't get it done in time, and here comes Oscar to help. Great, one more thing I need to watch his behavior to make sure it doesn't upset his stomach. Just once it would be nice that the only thing he eats is dog food. But no, that would be too damn easy.

Frying pan obstacle cours

I go to cross the kitchen to get more paper towels and I trip over the wonderful frying pan obstacle course that Jocelyn has laid out for me. And while I'm cleaning this up, she's gotten into the baking cabinet and pulled out the pecan crusher, quite a heavy (and deadly!) object. She takes the handle and heads over to the corner to beat on aluminum cans with it. Yeah, well, she's out of my hair.

I finish cleaning up the eggs mess, beat some more eggs and get started again. I finally get all of the chicken breaded and on the pan (which took some work, I ran out of room). I go to put them in the oven with some au gratin potatoes (worse yet, the generic kind ... what was I thinking!?!) and there's Jocelyn with an oven mitt on her hand - guess she wanted to help.

Munchkin struggling with the
Cocoa Puffs

I shoo her out of the kitchen so I can finish getting dinner in the oven and get cleaned up. I hear crinkling on the other side of the bar. I peek around the corner and I see an empty Cocoa Puffs box. And off she runs into the living room, where I find her struggling to get Cocoa Puffs out of the bag. It's too freaking cute, so I sit down with her and watch CMT and munch on Cocoa Puffs. Until I have to get up and check on dinner, and that's when I give her a small container full of Cocoa Puffs and I put the bag back in the box and put it away.

Back to dinner.

The good news here is that the homemade chicken nuggets taste pretty darn good, though it looks like Jocelyn isn't really impressed. Oh well, it was an excuse to use my new Blackberry Wine Barbeque Sauce, and that is happiness.

Cake decorating is definitely not in my future

Scratch cake decorating off the list of "jobs to search for." I am officially a crap cake decorator.

I've tried piping, but my hand's not that steady and I always managed to screw some letter up, spell something wrong, or whatever. So, I always end up taking a knife to whatever I piped and smearing it all over, creating a tye-dye effect. ("Yeah, that's what I was going for, really.")

After watching more "Food Network Challenge" than any one human should ever watch, I decided I'd try fondant. Come on, how hard can it be?

So, the first attempt involved a ladybug. Seriously, ladybugs are so easy to draw, I can surely do one in cake. I figure out the necessary shape I need to carve the cake into and I take a knife and get started. Somehow what I got looked more like a bat than a ladybug ... on top of that, it started to fall apart when I was cutting so I lost more than originally intended. Sigh. Well, perhaps fondant can fix it.

So, I add black food coloring to white fondant and get started. I get black fondant alright. And black handles to my rolling pin. And black hands. And a black silicone mat. But hey, the most important thing was that I succeeded at something - black fondant. Woohoo. So I put it on the cake and it actually went on pretty easy. But now the cake looked even more like a bat. Sigh.

I then get out the red fondant and roll it out. I cover part of the cake to make the wings. I go to cut out holes to show the black underneath for the spots, but my circles come out more oval ... more eye-shaped. Great, so now the spots on my ladybug are staring at you. Fantastic. I cut a little too much of the fondant off when shaping the wings, but oh well. You can still tell it's a ladybug.

Well, now I have to make sure the head looks like a head. I cut two pieces of licorice and put them on the head as antennae. Smart move, except that ladybug antennae aren't that thick and aren't red. Oh well, you work with what you have. Alright, so now she needs eyes. What do I have. Quick look around - Whoppers! Awesome. Well, you can't just have eyes and antennae, you must have a mouth. Grab some licorice shoestrings and add a mouth. Step back, ladybug face complete - but damn it's scary looking. Wow, ladybugs are supposed to be sweet and cute - not eerie and ghoulish. ("It's October, Halloween is coming, I made it freaky on purpose.")

Alas, we learn fondant tastes like crap after that venture. My friend introduces me to the joy that is marshmallow fondant - and I can even make it myself. So, enter attempt number two.

I make my cakes and let them cool. Then I make the fondant and put it in the fridge to set up a little bit. Then I'm ready to go.

I'm going to make a ghost this time, simply because I don't feel like dealing with food coloring. I get my knife and start carving. I carve off the sides to straighten them out - and just because I'm channeling my inner Pac-Man, I do some little waves at the bottom of the ghost. The cake starts to fall apart. (Note to self: Trying to make cake more healthy by using diet soda instead of eggs and oil, while it tastes fine, is not easy to carve or frost. STOP USING IT!) I give up on the waves at the bottom of the ghost and cut them off. My ghost just abruptly stops. Yeah, well, maybe Pac-Man ate off the bottom of him but he got away. ("It could happen!")

I roll out my fondant and cover the cake. I manage to cover it with the fondant, but since I had such a hard time getting the frosting on the cake without it falling apart, I can't get the fondant to stick. Enter the put-icing-on-finger-and-sliding-necessary-frosting-under-the-fondant trick. Messy, but hey, it works. Pseudo-ghost cake covered in white fondant. Whew!

Every ghost needs big, empty, hollow eyes, right? Well, I find something that will make a nice template and make two round indentations on the pseudo-ghost and grab some of my chocolate frosting to fill in the circles. But I apparently can't color inside the lines and chocolate frosting gets all over, and the eyes are no longer symmetrical. Well, ghosts don't need symmetrical eyes, right?

At this point I'm so frustrated I just give up. Screw it. I get some plastic wrap and cover it. Completely forgetting there's frosting on top, and as soon as the plastic wrap hits the frosting and moves just the slightest bit, we have chocolate frosting everywhere. What somewhat resembled eyes now resembles one giant brown blob in his "forehead" region. Well, maybe he's a cyclops.

Stupid cake decorating.

The good news is the cake should taste fantastic. Chocolate cake, marshmallow and graham cracker crumbs in the middle, with chocolate frosting and marshmallow fondant. Yum! Guess making stuff taste good is the only skill I have in a kitchen. But if I had to choose one, I'll go with making it taste good ... nothing worse than seeing something pretty and having it taste like crap. And if someone doesn't want to eat it because it looks bad - well, you know, more for me! ("Oh but I'm dieting. Foiled again!")