I hate cooking shows. I hate them because they provide no entertainment besides making me hungry and I hate them because they make the cooking of a souffle unnecessarily epic. Most of all I hate them because they remind me of my complete lack of interest and/or capability of ever becoming a domestic goddess.
That said, yesterday I somehow found myself watching highlights from ‘The Great British Bake Off” and, before I knew it, I had decided to bake some muffins. I use the term ‘bake’ in the loosest possible way – unless, of course, you count cracking an egg into some pre-made Betty Crocker muffin mix and spending 45 minutes picking bits of shell out.
Twenty minutes later the muffins that should have looked like this:
Came out like this:
Close enough.
Anyway, yesterday’s minor culinary misdemeanor took me back to another, more traumatic, occasion in a high school Home Economics class.
An incident that I’ve never spoken of since that day, until now…
***
“What do you mean you’ve got cooking tomorrow?” my mum shouted, trying to stop herself from hitting me upside the head, “where am I going to get all these ingredients at this hour?” This was back in the days where 24 hour supermarkets were nothing more than a dream, where staying in Tesco for a minute longer than necessary would see you herded out with riot shields… and, once again, I’d left it until 10 0′clock the night before to let my mum know I had Home Ec the next day.
Luckily, after a good root round the backs of every cupboard in the house and the weekly, “I swear to god if you do this one last time…” lecture, we managed to find enough flour and brown sugar to make whatever inedible baked goods Mrs. Jones had in store for me the next morning.
The following day I was stirring my gingerbread mixture, (silently wondering how everyone else in the class was already onto the decorating portion of the class) when, before my very eyes, my mixture began to move on its own accord.
At first I thought I was finally losing it, but after a couple of minutes I realised that my mixture really was stirring itself.
My mixture was full of maggots.
It turned out that the flour my mum had found at the back of the cupboard had been there for years and become the unlikely breeding place for a colony of moths.
I panicked. Clutching onto the oven and trying not to vomit I tried to figure out what to do. There was no way I could let my teacher know about the situation, I did have some pride left after all… but I wasn’t about to cook a writhing mass of maggots for the rest of the class to test-taste an hour later.
“Can I go to the sick room Miss? I think I’m going to faint.” I figured if I could get out of the rest of the class, I could creep back in at lunchtime and destroy all evidence – foolproof.
Foolproof… until the lovely Mrs. Jones showed up at the sick-room an hour later with a box full of gingerbread cookies.“I didn’t want you to have to clean up your station if you didn’t feel well, so I finished baking your cookies for you” she smiled.
She had baked the maggots.
And now she was presenting me with ginger-maggot, man-shaped cookies to take back to the classroom and share among my friends.
I could feel the vomit rising up again.
Luckily I have gone such a hideous green colour, the nurse decided to send me home so I didn’t have to figure out how to ditch the evidence before people started taking samples.
Later that night we inspected the cookies, to find that they really were full of maggots. So the question remains; how did Mrs. Jones miss the extra ingredient as she moulded the cookie dough? Or did she clock the situation and decided to cook them anyway?
***
Are you terrible at cooking too? Let me know your horror stories so we can bitch about Pinterest and all bask in each others failures.
