bahahahaha interpret that how u will :P
Ok so as everyone knows, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow; the most shamelessly exploited commercial non-holiday of the year. HURRAH FOR CAPITALISM!!!! That said, I have absolutely no qualms with celebrating Valentine's Day, primarily because every year I'm swamped by an influx of chocolates and gifts from secret admirers and it usually takes me about a month to work my way through it all!!!! HELLS YEAH!!!! ^-^v
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Ok you got me!!! That was a lie. But really, Valentine's Day is a perfect excuse for gift-giving and this year, being the genius that I am, I decided to try making my own chocolates... not so great an idea :P
So everyone who knows me knows that I can't cook and that while my parents were away on holiday in Hong Kong in the December-January just gone, I survived mainly on smoked salmon sandwiches and pasta... which Pedro helped me cook :P One or two days I had a stroke of luck and managed to produce something which was a bit more than just edible... but then there were the days where I horribly burned the cauliflower and such like :(
Anyhoo... today was spent trying to make Strawberry and Chocolate Hearts and Chocolate Truffles. I was going to make Chocolate-coated Strawberries too but I ran out of time :(
So!!!! First up...
Strawberry and Chocolate HeartsThe idea was to make a Strawberry and Chocolate ganache and coat it with a layer of tempered dark chocolate (in case anyone was wondering, tempering is the thing that u do to make ur chocolate nice and shiny and finished looking ^-^). What happened was that I didn't leave the ganache in the fridge long enough to make it easy to shape so I took the lazy option and just rolled them into truffles :P
In the end I ended with an extremely large batch of truffles, half of which were plain and the other half strawberry flavoured :S ... then came the coating with chocolate part... DUNDUNDUN!!!!
Methinks that whoever said pandas don't need dippig utensils is a silly silly man because a proper chocolate dipping thingy would have made my life so much easier... T-T also a properly chocolate thermometer would have been nice (tempering is a very exact and delicate process) but apprnetly coles doesn't sell them... who would have thunk it?
So anyway... here's a picture of the (kinda) finished product (was still waiting for the chocolate to fully solidify) taken with webcam coz I can't find my cammy...

...hopefully it didn't turn out TOO attrociously and that a certain someone doesn't get food poisoning or birdflu or something... ^-^' ...actually what am I saying? I should have laced it with arsenic just for fun!!! *smacks head* maybe next time...
Cleaning Up the Kitchenaaaaaahhhh!!!! My
favourite part of cooking!!! If that were true would that make me some kind of kitchen-dwelling masochist? o_O Seriously though, I cannot even begin to express how much it sucks to have to clean up after i cook :( u'd think that my hatred for cleaning would teachme not to make a mess but nooooooo... chocolate and icing sugar ALL OVER THE KITCHEN COUNTER!!!!! Icing sugar on my laptop which i was using to look at recipes (thankfully not alot)... sink full of chocolate covered dishes and utensils (coz i insist on using a new spoon/fork/whatever when dealing with different ingredents so as not to cross-contaminate... kinda pointless since it all gets mixed in together anyway... AND i'm not very good at 'cleaning as I go' :P) ...several different sized, chocolatey mixing bowls shrewn across the icing sugar frosted counter - i shook the icing sugar shaker too enthusiastically and it exploded - and when my mum came home after I'd cleaned everything up in an effort to hide the fact that I'd been making Valentine' Day chocolates (an attempt which failed coz she found the last of the truffles which I hadn't gotten around to wrapping up yet on my desk) she pointed out that somehow I'd managed to get chocolate on my glasses :S
So in conclusion... whoever said that cooking is a science is silly... why? Because if science was anything like my cooking my house would have gone up in a nuclear explosion long ago and my Google Maps Street View would look something like this...

hence I prefer to view cooking as an extremely messy art project...
NO GUARENTEED SUCCESS, BUT ALL GUARENTEED FUN!!!! XD