Friday 21 October 2011

How to make an amateur look Professional

You gotta love lazy money hungry Americans!  Reals!  If it weren't for those 2 factors, illiterate cooking people, like me would never be able to bake or cook good looking and tasting food.

See, I have a past. Me and food never got along in the kitchen.   It was like an Ike and Tina relationship. Someone always left physically hurt.  And most of the time, I played the part of Tina.  Actually....make it  ALL the time.  But after I entered married world, my cooking has improved....but never really stayed consistent.  But I found that cooking with a handicap, AKA, using gadgets or concoctions that made cooking a lot more possible, my kitchen skills have thus improved.


So yeah, thanks to the Americans that are lazy and money hungry, I was able to make these yummy puppies, post it on Facebook, and look like I knew what I was doing::

Brownies with buried chocolate skeletons.  Sounds enticing doesn't it?  Tastes pretty damn good too.  


Knowing my cooking past,  I obviously did not make all this from scratch.  Because if I did, it WOULD look like scratch.  Chicken scratch....and possibly not only look but taste like shit as well.  FO' reals.  I mean, yeah, I am an artsy fartsy type of chick who loves nothing more but to create things from nothing with my hands and shizz like so, but when it comes to cooking,  all that creativity suddenly decides that it don't know me no more, and I am just weak sauce.  No pun intended.

Let me explain how I was able to pretend that I knew what the hell I was doing.

For the good tasting brownies, the magic that created those chocolate flufflies was Betty Crocker.  Nuff said.

Now for the good looks

Being that I work at the arts and crafts center on base now, my eyes have been opened to even more types of possibilities in creativity.  One being baking and making candy and stuff.

One of the most popular things that we sell, and seems to be hot shit right now are candy molds.  What they look like is this::



And what you do is this:



Pretty spiffy, I think.  Also, looks pretty harmless as well...


And this is the packaging cover.  The selling point.  THIS picture right here not only made me "ooooh" and "aaaah" with delight, but it gave me ideas.  Ideas which were way over my head and  out of my league.  But because there was an, "everything in the store is 50% off" sale, I continued with my optimism and said, "what the hell, let's try it."



So I made it.....and above was the outcome.  Although the concept was really easy, Amy, being Amy, still made major boo boos during the process.  After successfully warming up the chocolate in the microwave, pretending I was on Martha Stewart status, I mixed the melted chocolate with a silicone spatula, poured the chocolate into a squeeze bag thingy, and copied the instructions.


This was the turn of events to follow my Martha Stewart mode:  I burned my hand from the hot chocolate in the bag, some black stuff popped out of the spout ( I have no idea where it came from),  I somehow burned something, because something smelled like it was burning, green chocolate started to infest our kitchen counters, broken skeleton limbs, and this.....


I simply gave up took the easy way out.  After creating 2 skeleton brownies, I simply took the remainder of the chocolate and just smeared them on top of the brownies.

I'm useless....but I'm trying, and being that this was my first time at using these candy molds, and considering the baggage in my cooking past, I think I did ok.  Also...I got a bit better at my smearing technique.

Once again, thank you America for helping this amateur pretend that she is a professional in something way out of her league.  My self esteem has been lifted because of you.



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