humor

Cooking is Cool!

From an early age, I remember going to visit my grandparents and watching my grandma make incredible food for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even snacks with simple ingredients and very little pomp and circumstance.

That’s probably why I have grown to love watching cooking shows, particularly shows like The Great British Bake-Off and The Big Family Cooking Showdown, both BBC series. I think my grandmother would have enjoyed them, too, as I learn so much about other cultures and what they grew up eating and what they consider to be their comfort foods.

I’m Not a Slouch in the Kitchen

I’m not bragging about my cooking prowess but I do believe it’s important for you to know that I’m not bad in the kitchen. I can cook great southern savory staples like buttermilk biscuits and gravy, chicken and dumplings, collard greens and bacon, pinto beans and cornbread, and the list goes on. It’s not my first rodeo.

I can make rustic breads, white breads, pizza dough, and even focaccia from scratch.

My homemade focaccia with decorative herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and olives.

When it comes to desserts, I’m pretty good, too. I’m not intimated by recipes. I read through them, gather my ingredients, and follow the recipe to the letter.

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

I took a week off from work and have been cleaning house, photographing birds in my backyard, and watching the aforementioned BBC cooking shows while sweeping and mopping the floors and folding laundry.

The Brits love to mix it up when it comes to desserts. I’ve watched Paul Hollywood, Mary Berry (before she and Paul went sideways with each other), and Pruh Leith judge many a contestant under the tent for their sticky toffee puddings, treacle tarts, swiss rolls, battenbergs, and sponges. I’ve seen contestants get emotional when Paul told them they had a soggy bottom (okay, you have to watch the show to understand) or Pruh questioned the snap in their biscuits (cookies to us from the USA).

One of my favorite things to watch the contestants make is a macaron, a sandwich-like cookie filled with buttercream, jelly, or ganache, according to Southern Living magazine. Macarons are nothing like the macaroon that we southerners love to devour. Those lovely holiday desserts are made of coconut and offer a chewy, sweet deliciousness when you bite into them.

And Then This Happened…

I had some time on my hands this morning so I thought to myself, “I think I want to try and make macarons. How hard can it be?”

I found a great little website called Sally’s Baking Addiction, with a “Beginner’s Guide to French Macarons” recipe that was ranked with five stars by Google searchers from around the globe. Sally had it going on.

Nearly 2,000 people loved this recipe from sweet Sally so I knew I’d love it, too.

I read through it to make sure I had all the ingredients. Unfortunately, I was short a few eggs so I drove down to the Dollar Store. Don’t judge me. I live in the country and the grocery store was seven miles away. I checked the date on the eggs and they were good to go.

When I arrived back to the house, I got out as many small bowls as I could find so that I could have all my ingredients out and accessible when I began making this favorite recipe of the people.

I sifted the ingredients, per the recipe. I used a candy thermometer to make sure the heated sugar and water were at the right temperature. I whipped the meringues to medium peaks and then combined all of the ingredients together to make the shell.

I even used a piping bag, something I’m not prone to do, but I went for it. I lined the pan with parchment paper. I piped the circles on the cookie sheets.

This is where I may have made my first mistake.

I never could find in Sally’s recipe exactly how many macarons the recipe made, but I’d already made two dozen and I had a lot of the mixture left. Sally’s picture showed two dozen so I could only assume that’s how many it made. Before you go there, yes, I do know what happens when one assumes.

I decided I wanted to make Texas-sized macarons so I went back over the batches with the extra mixture and added them to the original circles that I had created.

Unlike the macarons I’d seen on the TV show, mine started to spread like that first batch of pancake batter you put into the greased pan. The dogs always get the first one because they never turn out right. Or is that just me?

I knew, having watched the cooking shows, that macarons need to dry a bit before you put them in the oven so I left them on the counter to rest for 30 minutes so they had a dry top. Then they were headed to the oven. I looked inside and the top layer of macarons, while very large, didn’t look too bad. The bottom layer started to bubble up like a pancake that needed to be turned. What was happening?

I pulled the pans out of the oven after the required 15-20 minutes cooking time. The flatter macarons looked a bit dark on the bottom but the top pan still seemed a bit pale so I placed them back in the oven for a little more time.

The Final Results

Now I’ve had some great macarons in my life. In fact, I’ve loved them so much at the time that I photographed them for the memory, they were so delicious.

Macarons from a beach-side reception in Galveston.

As you can see below, my macarons look slightly different from the professional versions. While you can’t really tell from the photo, mine are not quite round, in spite of my impeccable piping skills. Most macarons measure around 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter. Mine, on the other hand, came in at a whopping 3-3.5 inches, almost big enough to hold a hamburger patty, if one chose to go the sweet and savory route.

The toothpick holder represents a normal sized macaron.

Once the macaron shells were cooled, you were to add butter cream icing, which I also made from dear Sally’s recipe. For some reason, it came out more like pancake batter than icing. Not to worry, I placed it in the fridge to “harden” a bit.

As you can see, the refrigerator did wonders for the butter cream icing.

The flatter macaron with butter cream spillage.

They say the key to a great macaron is that it should be delicate, almost like a floating cloud when you pop it into your mouth. The outside should have a light crunch with a chewy interior. Few things in my life have been described as delicate, whether it came to describing me or my cooking. I would probably use the word sturdy. I think that is much more fitting.

While I don’t post on this blog often, you might remember my first “Sticking with your Strengths” post when I discussed my inability to make a bow with a bow-maker or decorate a gingerbread house using a pre-made gingerbread kit.

Apparently, I can now add macarons to the things I am challenged by and should not attempt further. It’s important, my friends, to know your strengths, AND to be okay with the fact that you won’t succeed at everything, no matter how hard you try or read the instructions.

And to Sally, please know that my failed attempt at your beginner French macaron recipe is no reflection on you or the other nearly 2,000 people who thought it was the bee’s knees. It truly wasn’t you. It was me.

Until next time…

My name is Diann Bayes and I am NOT a crafter.

If you’ve followed any of my blogs, you know I love to shoot photography and share sunrises, sunsets, and photos of things I find to be beautiful that I capture through my camera lens. Many of my friends have commented on how much they love my photos.

I hesitate to tell this story but feel it is important I share it.

I’ll preface it with a tale from December 2018 when I bought a bow maker that gave you step-by-step instructions on how to turn ribbon into a beautiful bow for your Christmas wreath. I failed so dismally then, my husband made one in his wood shop out of sympathy for my lack of mental capacity to figure it out on my own. One would think I would have learned, but no.

Today, I decided to work on the lovely and thoughtful gift my friend, Lori Jo Thomas, gave me for Christmas recently, a Wondershop gingerbread kit that looks like a vintage camper, the kind I want to own some day.

I was so excited to see the cuteness that was inside the box awaiting me.

This afternoon, I pulled out the contents of the box, which included the perfectly formed gingerbread cutouts that made up the camper, white and black icing, a bag of gumdrops, a bag of cute little candy light decorations, and cardboard cutouts of Santa, a tree, and a grill. I was disappointed that the red icing listed on the box wasn’t there, but thought this is not a problem. I’ll use the black icing and the bag of white concrete icing and make it work. How hard could it be?

Before I got started, I reviewed the photo on the box. Being a huge fan of cooking shows, I thought rather than use the bag of icing that came with the kit, I would transfer it to a ziplock bag and carefully snip the edge like I know Duff Goldman, The Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten and Martha Stewart could do in their sleep, if they didn’t have a piping bag. I would then effortlessly pipe beautiful straight lines like the picture on the box shows.

I carefully warmed up the icing by massaging the bag, like the instructions suggest. Okay, they don’t use the word massage, but since that’s what it feels like you’re doing, I’m going with that description, no matter now wrong it sounds. I then fed the now warm and softened icing into the Ziploc freezer bag. I pushed all the icing to one corner, like EmmyMade would do, and carefully snipped off a corner. When icing the sides together, I had no real issues except that a few bigger chunks of icing came out of the bag and caused a bit of a calking issue. I thought I could pull it off as a rustic look. All good.

Once the structure was all “glued” together, I proceeded to the rooftop. Little did I realize the particular bag I used was described as a “stand-up bag for easy fill” so I didn’t know at the time I’d cut two little corners instead of one. Halfway through my first roof line, the icing blew out like panty hose packed into too heavy thighs. (Not that I’d know anything about that.) Rather than gorgeous icing lines, I got half-inch schmears like I was trying to put cream cheese on a bagel instead of piping icing on a rooftop. No sweat, I thought. I can clean this up. There’s no way, Duff, Martha, Ina, and Emmy got it in one take every time.

After attempting to clean up the mess that was my rooftop icing, I started on the gumdrop decorations. You’ll notice on my rooftop I only included the red ones. That’s because the OCD in me kicked in when I saw I couldn’t make a consistent row of matching gum drops unless I used all red. So I ate a green and orange one I had originally affixed on the roof, as they no longer made it into my color scheme, which apparently, I decided at that instance, was red.

I then started on the front of the camper and piped black icing around the windows and door, followed by a strand of icing that looked like the electrical for Christmas lights that were being hung. Once again, the OCD kicked in and I had to sort the lights in color order. By the time I had them separated out of the bag, (which when I opened it the first time, little candy lights flew all over the table and floor), the black icing was almost dry so I had to pipe even more black icing in order for them to stick. Of course, I ended up placing the wrong colors so had to yank those lights off the RV and replace them. Rather than throw the used candy lights back to be used again, I ate those, too, black icing and all. At one point, I looked like I’d been sucking on a ballpoint pen or brushing my teeth with charcoal.

Not seeing enough color in my decoration options and giving up my original all red thoughts, I went to the cupboard and found mini M&M’s and Reese’s Pieces. Knowing my husband would never forgive me for gluing his favorite peanut butter candies on something neither of us would be eating later, I went with the minis.

I’ve never been a petite person. I was 5’9” by the time I entered junior high. I wear a 9’1/2” shoe and buy the largest gloves they make for women’s hands. Have you seen the size of these candies? I would have better luck putting a lasso through the eye of a needle than placing these things in my hand and trying to get them to stick in a lovely pattern on a gingerbread RV.

After OCDing my way through the rest of the decorations and the tires on the front of the camper, I got the the cardboard cutouts and, miraculously, put them together with zero incidents. That, in itself, is a Christmas miracle!

I then surveyed my work with no holiday fanfare. I didn’t immediately get the holiday spirit and hear the crooning sounds of Mel Torme or the harmonies of Pentatonix ringing in my ear. I got nothin’, not to be confused with “nuttin” from the ear-bleeding song “Nuttin’ for Christmas.”

My husband came in from working in the garage and couldn’t stop laughing. I noted no sympathy in his hysterics. Being the man that he is, he immediately took in the cookie “vehicle” right down to the tires and gumdrop hubcaps, and without missing a beat asked, “Are those nipples?”

Once he straightened up from bending over laughing so hard that he finally could catch his breath and wipe the tears from his face, he said through continued snickers, “Honey, you can buy stuff and put it around the house and make it look real nice, but you are not a crafter.”

I finally gave up. I figured the back of the camper is kind of like the back of the Christmas tree. Why bother?

I sit here eating the last of the gum drops that should have made it on the camper as I write this. I felt it was kinder that they make their way into the gastric juices of my stomach rather than be sacrificial lambs to the disaster that is this gingerbread arrangement.

As I write this, I stare at the remnants of the finished work that is my 2020 Holiday Gingerbread Camper. Notice I added 2020, since I believe I can chalk almost everything up to this year from, well, you know, rather than accept the simple fact that I have limited to no crafting ability.

I consider myself a pretty good amateur photographer. No amount of photoshop improves the look. I tried.

To my friend, Lori Jo. You are such a thoughtful person. I hope you didn’t spend a lot of money and I really hope you weren’t expecting too much. Merry Christmas!

Lesson learned. Stick with your strengths, especially during the holidays!

P.S. – The day after I wrote this blog and to add insult to injury, my husband decided to take on the Christmas Story gingerbread house I had purchased to make, as well. I don’t know what he’s trying to prove but… whatever. So, my dear reader friends, who I know love to read my blogs and won’t turn on me, it’s up to you to vote on your favorite. Please leave them in a comment. Seasons greetings!