Reub's journey

31 March 2013

Cooking with peeps


Cooking is like alchemy, always searching for gold, coming up with other cool stuff as you go along, and punctuated with epic fails in between. Some young friends of ours have asked us to join in "Culinary Night" a tradition they observed with friends in Vancouver, BC: choose a country, create a menu, get the ingredients, then in a night of wine-fueled collaboration, cook it all up at somebody's house. I think this will be a load of fun.




These young friends do not yet know about my massive past failures, which include, but are not limited to:

1. The time I came back from a camping trip and absentmindedly dumped the the baggie of salt into the sugar bin & proceeded to prepare an inedible strawberry shortcake, serving up the first bowlful to a neighbor who immediately puked.

2. The time my then-7-year-old son asked if I could make "that snowman cake on the front of Woman's Day magazine at Krogers." Suffice it to say it was more like a blizzard of busted snowdrifts then anything resembling a snow man. (Who knew that a white cake mix was serious when they said to only use egg whites, not the whole egg? And that it wouldn't work if one didn't buy special cake pans.) Using yankee ingenuity, 7 boxes of *&$# cake mix,  and every damn over-sized pan in the kitchen, I DID, finally make that snowman's head: a HUGE white sphere, that would easily feed 120 people. But when that little boy turned 8 the next day, it was all worth it. I was exhausted.

3. The time I had a get-to-know-you session with a new food processor, resulting in hot cream of broccoli soup on all 4 walls of the kitchen. Yeah.


On Friday I decided to surprise John with a cake. The cup of sugar that you see next to the finished product is what I forgot to add while my mind was on auto-pilot during the preparation. The recipe had (oddly) called for 1 1/3 cups of sugar. Adding the 1/3 cup, I  imagine my sub-conscious hissing at me: that's ENOUGH toxicity, you moron! According to my favorite food writer, and many others, sugar is horrible.



Okay, "Subconscious-Know-It-All," whatever. Screw you. I've got my own back. I will add 16 ounces of chocolate frosting, chocolate chips,  and 18 Peeps to make this right. You see, it is a sunflower. How can that possibly be a bad thing?



It didn't look like a sunflower to John at first, but if I held it up just right and said the word "sunflower" he quickly caught on.  Neither of us felt like actually eating this creation. So it just sat there.

It sat there until last night when we had an impromptu dinner party with the neighbors on either side of us, who had never met one another: wild sockeye salmon with aioli sauce, fresh asparagus, home-made sourdough bread, green salad, and...a revolting Peep sunflower cake. 


Which.They. Devoured.

So, all in all, I have confidence that Culinary Night will work out with our sophisticated young peeps, err, friends. The theme will be vegetarian food from India. Ideas anyone?



35 comments:

  1. well, i want to know if the neighbors had been drinking - a lot - before dinner and dessert. :) just kidding!

    your salt/sugar mix-up reminded me of when i was a kid, making apple crisp for the family. mistakenly added 1/4 cup salt instead of 1/4 teaspoon. even the barn cats wouldn't touch it.

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    1. Come to think of it, the neighbors were well-lubricated. :0) This is always helpful.

      Your apple crisp and my strawberry shortcake! Let's develop a new cookbook for salt lovers only.

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  2. Mark Bittman is an ass. I've met him, in fact. Sugar is wonderful. You just can't eat too much of it, that's all.

    The Peep cake is a work of art!

    Every cook has had epic failures; it's part of the fun. xx

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    1. Ha! He's an ass! I think I'll add a little sugar to my coffee, take that Mark Bittman. I do like his "How To Cook Everything" book, however.

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  3. Oh my goodness, those are some kitchen doozies! Sorry, but I confess to laughing at all of them. I think your sunflower cake looks wonderful; perhaps that might fool people into thinking it tastes as good as it looks!

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    1. They ate that cake right up, peeps and all. How bad could it have been? (Don't answer that one; it's a rhetorical question!)

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  4. What great fun. I do not remember my failures although I have had many. Maybe they just get hidden deep in my subconscious so that I can pretend they never happened. Love the sunflower cake!! I am glad that you meant peeps and not "peeps".

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    1. If someone puked when you fed them I feel sure you would remember. Your failures have not been, perhaps, as dramatic as that.

      I guess you could interpret "peeps" in a variety of ways:)

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  5. i'm certain that if i have had cooking failures of those sorts i have not had the fantastic sense of humor to have enjoyed them. i am still chuckling over the shortcake...

    the thing that is coming to mind is the time i made ambrosia (the dip, not the salad) and instead of grabbing the sesame seeds, i grabbed the uncooked quinoa, which not only did not taste very good, but made dan sick (he can't do quinoa cooked, let alone "raw"). lesson: don't keep *unlabelled* look-alikes next to each other in the freezer!!

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    1. Ooooh, quinoa! Somebody was just telling me that it can be tricky, and I didn't know that. (By tricky I mean deadly, but I didn't really believe that.)

      Yesterday John started to eat aquarium rocks which I had placed in a candy dish to hold a bulb I wanted to force. oops. Funny how anything looks like candy in a candy dish.:)

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  6. You'll want to get some Naga Bhut Jolokia (ghost peppers).

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    1. I'll have to look that up because I don't know what they are, but they sound intriguing. Thanks!

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    2. "The hottest pepper in the world" !!!! Should I try it? I can foresee yet another epic fail with this one.

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    3. I have some dried ones. They really are too hot for most people, so I guess it depends upon your tolerance level.

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    4. My tolerance is quite high. And there will be more than just one curry. So maybe I'll go look for these at the Indian market.

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  7. The culinary club sounds interesting. Your cake looks good to me; but then, I don't attempt any desserts for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that both my husband and I wouldn't let that cake alone until it was all gone. We are definitely avoiding such calamities at my house. We get desserts only when we are in a fancy place and the plates are so small that we are still hungry.

    p.s I didn't know you too had been a teacher. How long have you been retired?

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    1. If we do Italy, I may just have to consult you!

      I retired from teaching art just last year:)

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  8. It's a beautiful sunflower cake but just the idea of eating a peep makes me sick.

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    1. I know! I can't understand how it is that John loves them; they're gross! But cute.

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  9. Enough alcohol and anything is palatable:)

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    1. Yes, that is true. One of the neighbors took 2 pieces home to his son & father-in-law. I hope that went ok even if they aren't wine drinkers.:)

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  10. nope ... i would find a good indian restaurant and order something to bring ... yeah i am a cheater

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    1. aha! That must be why one of the rules are "Prepare on-site!"

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  11. :) I'll have to refer my sister to this post. We had quite the conversation on Peeps, today.

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    1. Most people either love them or hate them. Do you have differences of opeepnion?

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    2. We grew up with Peeps in our Easter baskets, so we could never hate them. That said, we're Purists. Yellow and pink are the only acceptable colors.

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    3. A Peep Purist! Yeah somehow the blue ones seem more inedible than the yellow ones, for sure.

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  12. Your Culinary Night sounds like great fun. As for Indian food, I know nothing about cooking it but I love eating it - spicy with lots of nan on the side, please!

    I love your peeps cake story.

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    1. I know there will be loads of nan there; somebody has already said they want to make it. It may be me who makes a crazy-hot curry:) I don't know where you live, but if it were here, I'd invite you.

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  13. As someone who can only fry an egg, any cooking impressed me.. I love your cake it looks great, eating it though I don't know

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    1. Forgetting the sugar made the cake better than it might have been. But there is still a piece left over, under saran wrap on the kitchen counter. So I don't know about eating it either.

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  14. Peggy and I looked at this post together with her saying, "How cute," several times. Like your neighbors, I would have eaten the cake. We almost never have decadent treats at home, so when I encounter one elsewhere, I scarf it right down.

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    1. Sounds like you'd fit right in over here.

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