My arch-nemesis, Betty Crocker

So, it's Memorial Day weekend, here on Gilligan's Island.  We're going to the house of some friends across the street for dinner tomorrow and I volunteered to bring a dessert.

Those of you who know me, are laughing right now.

It's not that I can't cook, per se.  It's just that I don't.  And when I do try, strange things happen.  I've had accomplished culinary artists provide me with a "foolproof recipe", supervise my every move and be rendered speechless by the ensuing tragedy.  It would be funny except that I am hungry.

When we were waiting and hoping for a child, people didn't ask what we'd name a son or daughter, but what we'd feed them. 

I do manage to keep us all alive, but it's usually only because I rely heavily on processed and pre-packaged foods.  I'm working on that, but two jobs and two houses and an active little dude all add up to me not having a ton of time to LEARN how to cook.  As I explained to my sister, the Farm Maven, I don't have a repertoire of recipes available to me.  There was silence on her end of the line as she digested this news.

Then, always the Fixer, she began to recite a "foolproof and easy" recipe for a dessert that I could take over to our friends' tomorrow.  After the seventh ingredient, my eyes rolled back in my head and I started looking at the tubs of cookie dough at Kroger.  Seriously...who has the TIME?!

But, in Country Living this month, there was an easy-peasy recipe for petit-fours.  THREE ingredients:  pound cake purchased from the grocery store, confectioner's sugar and water.  I CAN DO THAT, I thought to myself!  AND IT WILL BE SO PRETTY, JUST LIKE THE MAGAZINE PHOTO!

Damn you, Country Living, you deceitful wench!

First of all,  in order to pour the icing over the cake, I needed cooling racks to set the cakes on.  I do have them, I swear...but they're at the Taj MaHell.  Not wanting to buy something I already had and DEFINITELY not wanting to go to the store on the Saturday before Memorial Day in a seaside community...I improvised.

With spaghetti noodles.

(Hey, it actually worked.  Don't be a hater)

So, cooling rack dilemma solved, I got started.  My next disaster  minor setback was that the ratio in the recipe was all wrong.  Two cups sifted confectioner's sugar and four tablespoons water does NOT make a "60-second frosting."  It makes a six-hour hot mess.

Observe:

I kept adding more and more sugar until it finally reached a consistency somewhere between snot and cement.  As you can see, it didn't neatly cascade down the cakes, but instead just made a couple of uneven streaks and called it a day.

I sliced up TWO poundcakes and used so much sugar that I only got about a third of the dang things glazed before I ran out.  So, I DID have to go to the stupid store on the Saturday before Memorial Day, in a seaside community.  Tank was a good sport and went along for the ride, which was good because...like he had a choice, right??

Since he was such a good boy, he was allowed to pick a Matchbox car as a prize.  I believe he chose most wisely:

A Hong Kong Phooey car.  Awesome on a number of levels.

Sadly, the awesomeness ends right there.  The petit-fours experiment was abandoned and all the Rhesus monkeys were set free, before more harm could come to them.

I've decided to take a no-bake pie tomorrow.

I know what you're thinking...no way she can eff that up.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

 

****UPDATE****
The Farm Maven read the above and had this to say:  "Well, if nothing else, you can be proud that you've managed to somehow reach this point in your life without actually learning to cook."

We celebrate the small victories here, folks.