MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2011
Maybe I'm Cursed
I'll tell you how....my little girl decided she wanted to have a Halloween party this year for her birthday & I've been busy. Busy, I tell you. Busy & cursed!
I love Halloween. I do. So I was excited to do this for her. I swear.
We saw these terrific 'cake pops' in my magazine. Inspiration! Check it out here: http://youtu.be/mVaomkGIIfE
We set out to make invitations, inspired by this: http://www.gtpowell.com/category/freelance/
I was also trying to put together costumes for our family.
I did search upon search to get inspired for a creepy meal fit for fiends... & finally, we had it all set. Everything was coming together, or so it seemed, until Murphy's Law kicked in.
So I started to make up the invitations, & found that I could not use my favorite photo-editing program because it apparently expired. I did the best I could & ended up creating this, not exactly what I had intended, but it works.
We have the witch & the black cats in the side yard, Nosferatu in the window & Frankenstein's monster coming out the door...& some kind of ghostly image in front of the garage where I couldn't erase my daughter's bicycle very well. (Sure did like my expired program....sigh.) But you know, they're 10 so it's fine.
But then came another shot of bad luck. I couldn't print it. When I plugged in my printer & tried, I got an error message that the carriage is stalled. I don't even really know what that means. But I persevered, because that's what we do for our children. I emailed it all to my awesome mom, & asked her to do the printing. She'd been cursed too. She had issues with the front & back lining up & facing the right way... but it did eventually come together.
So my precious takes them to school to deliver them (except they aren't allowed to pass them out in from of all the children unless all the children are invited, so she has to slip them into their lockers. And one child isn't in her class so even though she went to the right area, she didn't know which locker belonged to her & gave up. Good thing this is the kid whose mom is my friend, & I was able to extend the invitation verbally.)
I'm telling you now, I've never had such bad luck all at one time. Really. If it could go wrong, it did.
As we are approached the party date & I began to prepare for real. Worked on cleaning the house & decorating for Halloween & yelling at the family to pick up their stuff everywhere. Went shopping for the food stuffs...& ran into issue #5. Yeah, already up to 5!
The melting chocolate-like wafer candies were not available in all the colors we'd decided upon. Plan B, some food coloring the store personnel recommended.
I let my girl bake her own cake. The curse is back. She chose the wrong pan & the center never cooked through. When it came time to break the cake into crumbs, I scooped a good portion into the trash. Yes, the trash, because my disposer that had a guarantee until 1995 picked that week to die. (I don't care that it lasted 16 years longer than promised. It died at a most inopportune time.) So the one box of cake mix that was supposed to make 48 cake pops, in reality, made about 28. Check 7. Check 8.
So I crumbled what was left of the cake & couldn't find the tub of frosting. Check 9. No panic. I can make frosting. I've done this. So I get some cream cheese, some butter, some vanilla & some powdered sugar. Voila! Perfection. I mixed this deliciously evil stuff with the cake crumbs until just moist enough to stick together, per the YouTube tutorials, of which I'd watched at least a dozen. I let them set up a bit in the fridge, then put in the candy-dipped sticks. Everything is going surprisingly well. I'm kinda getting into it, kinda on a roll.
So back to the cake pops I go. I decide that a coffee cup is the best way to melt the wafers, as I don't have microwave safe plastics & I don't want to poison all the children with bph. Beside, the cake balls would need to be dipped, so I thought deep & narrow was a good choice. I was careful when nuking, stopping the microwave every 10-15 seconds to stir. I'd forgotten to buy a Styrofoam block to stand them in, but I got a cardboard box with some slits to hold the pops. I dipped the 1st one, & sonofagun! I had to keep that sucker spinning pretty good to keep the weight of the chocolate from pulling the ball off the stick as the excess coating dripped off. Tap gently, the instructions all said. Yeah, right. Issue # 11!
I go back for another look-see & I forgot to thin with shortening, so I add that & try again. A little better, but not much. What I learned is that the white candy was cooling too much between dips while I was waiting for the excess to drip off & that the cardboard box was a terrible & completely ineffective substitute for the Styrofoam block. The pops kept leaning way over til they fell or bopped into each other....& I only had 4 done. Issues 12 & 13.
Oops, forgot another- I guess it's 10 -deciding that some were ghosts, we made a couple sort of irregularly shaped. Found that the top bit kept falling off into the cup. Round it is.
Then I notice, #14, that there were some hard bits in the coating. I have no idea what they are, where they came from. Someone I know who does quite a lot of baking said perhaps i scorched the chocolate, or maybe had some water in it. I have no idea. I know I was extremely careful, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I've already grown annoyed with them.
Another friend did some research for me after hearing my woes & said that she saw where someone used the store-bought frosting, melted that, & it worked the same way. It set up & hardened in no time. I found that tub & I tried that.
Issue #15. When I stirred in the food coloring, it got weirdly lumpy. I don't know if this is because it was already molten, if it's because it was frosting & the food coloring was for candy...I have no idea. But I have 2 awfully wart-ty pumpkins...There was plenty of frosting though, so I'd dip 2 quickly, then dump it & start again, & dip 2 more....This mostly worked out ok, but the box was not working so what I'd ended up doing was just setting them down in paper cupcake liners. I was able to complete some orange for jack-o-lanterns & some green for witches.
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| Never. Again. |
Phew! Next I returned to the chocolate wafers (not white chocolate, but milk chocolate) for the werewolves. These all went smoothly! Woo-hoo! Then I put the black food coloring in & continued for the cats...but no matter how much I put in, it really wasn't getting black. #16. How much more bad luck can there be? I dipped, dropped into the liner, plopped on some chocolate chip 'ears' & with only 3 to go, the pops started to fall off the sticks, again. #17...I got out a fork, fished that ball out & put in in the cupcake liner, jammed that stick back in, placed the ears & was grateful to be done with it! Decorating was the fun part anyway....
#18... The cake pops coated with frosting were allowing the cake color to leach through. The neon green witches faces had awful lumps & reddish-hued bumps protruding all over. (Red velvet cake is beautiful elsewhere. Not here.) I pretended to ignore it & moved on.
#19. I thought a Hershey's Kiss on one of the wafers would make a cute witches hat. No. The flat bottom of the Kiss is exactly the same diameter as the wafer. No brim. So I melt up the wafers, spoon a little out onto waxed paper & center the Kiss on it, then place in the fridge to chill. It works beautifully. They peeled right off the paper & I plunk it down on the lumpy greenish-speckled witch balls &....#16. The lollipop stick is right in the center & the hats don't fit on at all.
I explain the pitfalls to my daughter. What if we don't decorate them? They are still Halloween colors, sorta, & I even offer to scrap it all & bake a traditional cake that I know I can make pretty. (I've done that before.) Bless her little heart, she said, "I don't really care what they look like if they taste good." I couldn't promise her they would after all they'd been through, but I was happy to wash my hands of them & be done.
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| See? This wasn't too bad. Easier than the blasted cake pops! |
I filled the jack-o-lantern pinata with candy. I hung the scene-setters. I draped he furniture with sheets to look like a haunted house. My husband hung the cobwebs & put out the tombstones. I set the table & put the wings in the marinade. I put 3 drops of the black food coloring into Italian dressing & squirted it over chicken wings so we could call them 'bat wings' for dinner...
Everything was going to be fine. The oven was preheating as the children began to arrive. White & sweet potato fries would be skeleton & scarecrow fingers to eat with the bat wings. The vegetable/appetizer was Tomato Basil Bisque, one of my daughter's favorite soups, that we dubbed Creamed Vomit...# 20.
I accidentally bought non-dairy creamer instead of half-&-half & never even noticed. The kids weren't big fans of the soup. It is a little spicy so that could be it, or it could be that it was freakin' non-dairy creamer!!
#21 & 22...the main course. I had 2 baking sheets of fries in the oven & then I added 1 more with the wings. The oven temperature dropped & my husband, who is paranoid of undercooked chicken kept opening the door to check on them even though, like the Bickersons we are, I told him he was letting all the heat out.... so I leave him to it & corral the girls for presents before dinner.
He decided to get out the deep-fryer & fry the wings in batches. However, at one point, he put too many in, trying to speed things up I guess, & it 'boiled' over.... so he has hot grease running all over the kitchen & a pan full of raw chicken, & we're all oblivious in the living room....
It's now just about an hour after the kids were supposed to eat, & the french fries don't even look crisp. I jacked the oven up to 500, wings are back in....we wait some more. I turn on the broiler, & that works. My husband takes some wings & puts them on a plate & microwaves them... (I know, eeew, nuked chicken. I hoped it was true that children will eat anything if they could dip it in a sauce. I had sauce!) Back under the broiler for a few to hopefully crisp up the skin...& finally, dinner is served!
I'll just call these 23, because we wanted to make our own labels, but without a printer, that was not happening. Luckily, these weren't hard to find & weren't very much. I'd intended to label the 'specimen jars' as well, but that didn't happen. They still looked just fine.
So the kids did actually eat a little bit & we round up for the pinata....#24. It was dark out. We deliberately went into the evening because my daughter wanted to tell ghost stories by a bonfire, but it rained the day before & was wet & the temperature dropped 20 degrees, so it was only about 40 at this point, You know what? I'm calling that #24.5.
So we go out to do the pinata, in the dark, & my birthday girl goes first. One WHACK! Candy went flying! They wanted to hit at it anyway, so we let them...until it was mush. then they try to collect the candy, but it was too dark :( Poor things. They did find some & the girls who had a few pieces were polite enough to share with the girls who didn't find any, in the dark, mingled with the leaves....
I felt so bad that by the time the party was actually over, despite my screaming headache, I did allow the 2 neighbor girls to spend the night despite that I had said, "No slumber party," when asked if they could have one of those for their birthday parties.... (My girls birthdays are within 9 days of each other, so they are always discussed & planned simultaneously.)
Though absolutely nothing from beginning to end went the way it was supposed to go, they enjoyed themselves anyway. They said the bat wings were nasty, but the cake pops were actually delicious.
And #25, one of the girls stepped in dog poo....& I don't even think it was from one of my dogs because they haven't been out in the backyard for a month or more. They like the front where they can see the whole neighborhood....
What say we gather the villagers & hunt that Murphy down for cursing me?
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