Friday, February 24, 2012

Ingredients Lacking

I have this wonderful, truly amazing chocolate recipe. This is what it looks like:

It tastes like pure, unadulterated heaven!
The interesting ingredient in this cake is sour cream.
Today I thought let's make that delicious cake (diet is dead for the week anyway) and got the ingredients together. I didn't have sour cream, but did have normal cream, so used that instead. What I love about this recipe is that you put all the ingredients in one bowl and use a blender. No separating eggs, sifting flour, or any of that kind of stuff. When the ingredients are well mixed, you divide it between 2 sandwich pans and there you go. It's so simple and yet so incredible.

So, there I was - ingredients in the bowl, blender out, mixing away.
It wasn't working. The mixture was getting stuck to the blender arms (what do you call those things? The mixer part...) and when I lifted the blender, bits of chocolate dough flew off, landing on every surface in the kitchen. And the walls, the kettle, me...
I kept thinking - can the fact that I've used normal cream instead of sour cream make such a difference? So I added a bit more cream, then after not seeing a great difference, added a bit of milk. It was awhile before the mixture vaguely resembled what it should and I thought - oh, well, how bad can it be? and started spooning the mixture into the baking pans. It was then that it hit me. I had forgotten the eggs!

So, I scooped out the mixture, back in the mixing bowl, added the eggs, beat it all up (again) and back into the baking pans it went.
The time meant to take to bake this cake is 25 min. The time it did take? 1 hour and 5 minutes.
Was it good?
No.
And then I thought. It's like a relationship - if there is a basic, but very necessary ingredient missing, it won't matter what else you add, what you put in instead or how much of a different ingredient you use, if you don't have one of the basic ingredients you need, it's just not gonna be good, is it?
And sometimes, even when you do eventually add that ingredient, it could be too late. And it will no longer mean what it would have, had you added it right in the beginning, when you needed to.
The cake is still sitting on the table where it has been the whole day. Every one tried a small piece, no one finished their slice and no one asked for more.
I'm not suprised.
On the outside it might look good, but that's about it.

4 comments:

  1. I'm so glad to have found you and so utterly grateful to you for listing me. And the cake sounds fantastic. The marriage advice and the metaphor here are both striking.

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  2. Perfect. Just perfect. And so true. Sometimes you cannot fix cake later. Sometimes it's just a hellse gemors. Like marriage. x

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  3. Yip, Sian. A hellse gemors is exactly what it is.

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