Woops!

Last night I was so bored that I actually sat down to watch "Mr. Magorium's Magic Emporium" It is a strange film. About one hour into it I was completely asleep. This seems to be my pattern lately--boredom to sleep. What I need is a good, gripping book. But whenever I go to the library it is constant work to keep EZ from pulling down every book at his eye level, while the cranky teen-aged librarian mutters annoyances left and right. "Mess..." "Takes forever to clean up...."

Generally boredom leads, for me, to creative cooking. However, I have lately (and, hopefully, temporarily) lost the drive to make late-night goodies. Plus, I have had some interesting cooking mishaps over the last little while.

One morning, several weeks ago, Aaron called me and told me that he forgot that he was supposed to provide the "birthday treat" for a coworker that day. "No problemo," I thought. HY and I will whip up something gorgeous to showcase our excessive domestic talents and WOW the girls in the office. (Oh yeah, and EZ can help too.)

I decided to make individual chocolate tarts. But I didn't want to just fill some pie dough with chocolate pudding and call it good. Yuck. So I spent the morning tweaking a brownie/cookie recipe to fit in as tart dough. Then the boys and I scoured the local grocery haunt for decent chocolate that we could temper in heavy cream. The idea was to come up with something between ganache and chocolate whipped cream (a very light mousse, if you will) that we could pipe into our tart shells.

Well, like every single time that I cook to impress and act all "I'm such an oustanding gourmet," something went very very wrong. We had to have the tarts at Aaron's office by 3:00 p.m. At 2:35 I had the cooled chocolate cream whipping away in the mixer while I grated fine chocolate into beautiful velvety shreds. The next thing I know, HY walks out naked from the bathroom requesting some help with the Charmin portion of his toilette..and I hear EZ splashing away in the soiled toilet water. Ugh.

It turns out that while Mom was busy tempering chocolate, HY went to the bathroom then popped off the toilet to sit on the edge of the bathtub to play with a toy (effectively soiling the shower curtain that was in the way, and allowing EZ ample opportunity to splash away to his little heart's content.)

A round of disinfectant later, I returned to the kitchen to find chocolate butter in the mixer. Yes, I had over-beaten the cream, which had separated into unappealing little balls of chocolate flavored butter. I COULD HAVE DIED. It was now about 2:50 p.m. and I was supposed to be filling little tart shells, but, instead, I was staring at chocolate butter wondering what in the world I was going to do with it.

In the end, I melted some of the chocolate butter and tried to pour some of it over solid chocolate pieces in the tart shells, then cover them in whipped cream and cocoa powder.

I was so embarassed about the whole thing that I made Aaron come out into the parking lot to get them instead of bringing them in myself.