Culinary Masterpieces

Anyone who knows me, probably knows two things about me:

1. I like to cook.

2. I'm a huge disaster.

Unfortunately, on occasion, those two pieces of my life merge and we have episodes in our kitchen like this:

You know, the kind of episode where I'm making pizza dough and set it on the oven to warm, just like I always do, and then just before we leave to go pick Joe up at the metro, I turn the oven up to 500 degrees so I can have it hot for the pizza when we get back. Normally at this point I remove the bowl from the stove top because the heat vent on the back of the oven gets quite hot and I'm ready to start rolling the dough out anyway. Unfortunately for us, this night was an exception to what normally happens.

Goodbye my lovely mixing bowl. It's sad to part after 5 1/2 years together. It was also sad to part with 1/2 of this pizza dough as it was partially cooked and unusable for our pizza. It could have been worse, the house could have burned down or ALL of the pizza could have been wrecked. We did get one pizza out of the deal that was completely edible and tasty. I'm pretty sure this is a case where ordering pizza would have actually been CHEAPER than making our own since the cost of cooking was wrecked pizza dough and a mixing bowl.

Just to assure everyone that this cooking mishap is not necessarily that unusual in my kitchen, I've included a picture of the less-than-beautiful red velvet cheesecake I made for Valentine's dinner. Don't get me wrong, the cake tasted great, but after 6 hours of baking and prepping the thing, it just loses some effect as a fancy, delectable restaurant quality dessert when it looks like this:

Xandra was not impressed with my cake and told me several times that the cake does not look good. Thanks, Xands. That shot actually looks good compared to what it looked like when it fell to the side in the fridge and rested against the milk jug. I'm sure that happens all the time at the Cheesecake Factory.

There were so many problems I don't even know where to begin. Obviously, the bottom layer was crooked. This is only a problem if you have three other layers to add to it, one of them being an entire cheesecake, which is probably too heavy to not be the bottom layer in the first place. In addition to layer difficulties, the frosting I used between layers was VERY slippery. This only contributed to a speeding of the tipping process in the fridge. I also ran out of frosting, which was also too thin. No one knew (okay, actually we both knew) any of this, though, when I sliced it into pieces and put it on a plate to serve two hours later. And no one cared, either as we eagerly devoured the delicious dessert.

Really, what would dinner at my house be without a few disasters (even without the kids) to accompany it, anyway?