I posted this AGES ago--first on Bubblews, then here on FB--& I thought that NOW, since I have a great many more friends (who pay attention), Id RE-post this. Yes, its long, but worth the read. In any case, just wait til you HAVE 5 minutes (10 if youre slow) to do it justice. This is a true story. My Aunt Oletas Crazy Cooking In my family, my youngest aunt, Oleta, was infamous for her weird experiments, or errors, in cooking. I think we had a hint of her future goofs when she was in seventh grade home economics. One day she was assigned the task of cooking biscuits. Now, I know biscuits seem easy, but theyre trickier than you might think. Its not so much the recipe as the touch. If one hasnt got the feel of the dough right, one ends up with what Oleta did. She was crying, & angry, because the teacher had given her a great grade--for her =crackers!= Then, there was the mysterious cake she made in which she inadvertently switched two of the ingredients =amounts.= One ingredient had only a quarter of a teaspoon, & the other needed a cup worth. No-one who ever bit into the finished product has ever stopped talking about her salt cake! To be fair, ANYONE could have confused salt & sugar, since they look the same. Put them in the same area, & well.... There was also a chocolate cake that turned out fantastically well, in terms of taste...once one figured out how to GET to it.... Shed made up her own version of the icing, & coated the good cake with it. Let me tell you, NASA would surely have paid a =mint= for the recipe for that icing, because =nothing= could penetrate it! NOTHING! Knives didnt cut through it. Direct =flame= wouldnt burn it off or melt it. Heck, even our HAMMER couldnt break through it! NASA could have coated whatever rocket went into space with it, & been sure it would not burn up in the atmosphere once it returned to the Earth, because it was impervious to EVERYTHING! That stuff put me in mind of the metal cages virgins were forced to wear in the Medieval era, to convince their traveling husband hed return from the wars to find her reproductive area hadnt had any fun without him while hed been gone. This same icing acted as an equally stubborn barrier, keeping the cake within untouched. And untasted, to all but a couple whod gotten a sliver before Oleta iced over the rest. We really wanted some of the cake in there--but what to do? I cant recall which of us it was who stumbled onto the solution, but we realized there was a sort of back door to this reluctant creation of hers. We really =wanted= to be able to say something nice about it--for Oletas sake--but without a way to even touch it--let alone taste it--we felt sure Oleta would be disappointed. Still we decided to stick it into the fridge & wed brainstorm about it. But this was not a LITTLE cake! A big three-story one, in fact. It would take two people to do the job; one to hold the cake still while the second would take a big knife & slide it under to pry it loose from the huge plate on which it lay. Somehow, as the two worked, the logistics went wonky, & the cake shot off the plate. It did a spin in the air, flipped, & landed upside-down on the counter, rock-hard icing DOWN. And, lo, we all stood & stared at the un-iced =bottom= of the cake! We opted to ignore niceties such as =slicing= & instead used the big cooking spoon to scoop out the contents of the granite-hard hull. We each took a fluffy spoonful, abandoning the icing, as even had we discovered a way to break it, it would certainly have broken our teeth to try it! And what other use might it have, anyway--a doorstop, maybe? The CAKE, though, proved worthy of our efforts! And the calories! None of us--not even my great cook-slash-grandmother, Mama, had ever made a better chocolate cake! Eventually, over the next few days, we ate it all, the icing still intact sitting up-side-down acting as a bowl for the cake, looking just like the shell of a dead, brown turtle under the glass cake cover! But even THAT wasnt Oletas most infamous cake. Given the previous semi-success, she decided to make another chocolate cake--this time making a better icing. No-one was home when she began laying out the equipment & ingredients, or what resulted from her efforts would probably never have happened. She wanted to surprise us, anyway, so she was alone. Ah...the road to hell...good intentions...you know what they say.... Since it was in the Summer in Louisiana, there were several things we had to do to keep the house relatively cool--especially if one chose to BAKE without fainting from the heat. One thing we all automatically did (in these pre-air-conditioning days), was keep things such as lipstick & chocolate in the fridge--or theyd melt! So naturally Oleta grabbed the chocolate from the fridge to use. She went to work, following the recipe as closely as possible. Finally, she melted the pure chocolate bars & used them to ice the cake. This was NOT going to be a NASA cake icing THIS time, no siree! The cake was cool, she iced it, & left it on the table for all to see when we returned from wherever it was wed gone. Id tell you that if I could remember, but we were all so preoccupied that whatever wed been doing =paled= in memory next to the new...& daunting...cake. Im sure I couldnt have been alone in thinking it might be better to insult Oleta than be a guinea pig for her latest offering.... Anyhow, by this time, =anything= which my aunt cooked was met was met with nervousness, at least! We each took a single bite. No salt (Whew!). The textures of both the cake AND the creamy icing were fabulous! We took another bite. The taste was lovely. Oleta watched as we each consumed one slice, some of us two. Gradually her face relaxed, & we found words to praise her success. She beamed. WE beamed. Half an hour later, there was a near-riot among us to get to the bathroom first--repeatedly. It had been Mamas Exlax medicinal chocolate bars Oleta had so conveniently found, that day. It took us quite a while to get over the effect on our innards, & maybe a little longer than that to try =anything= she ever cooked again! The End
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 08:27:38 +0000
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