Yet Another Good Deed Gone Bad

Shaboom sends us her update from Paris some other foreign place:

I guess my Christmas present to Karen is relieving her of blogging duty for a week so she has more time to do last minute shopping, cookie baking, attending to a sick kid, Elf hiding and whatever else perfect, over-achieving moms like her do the week before Christmas.

Oh yeah, the Elf on the Shelf lives in her house and she's not blogging about it. That's right. It's all over her Facebook page (where everyone connected to her who knows her and loves her despite the fact that she's perfect.) But when it comes to the blog-o-sphere, she's holding back so that all of you who don't know her won't hate her because she's sickeningly perfect.

But I'm on to you, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Bam! (And sorry in advance - I know you hate when I post loooooong blog entries. Please don't hurt me!)

Anyways, since Karen is a role-model to many, including me, I tried to put on my best happy homemaker hat the other day. I baked. I use that term very loosely. Actually, what I did was attempt to make Rice Krispie Treats for the first time in my life. Big mistake.

On the bright side, I didn't burn anyone's house down nor did I cut off any of my digits.

I knew that SexySultry was going to come home from a day of shopping and insist that we exchange our gifts that night since I'll be far away on Christmas. It wasn't something she said, but I know her well enough to anticipate her excitement at finding the perfect gift for me. And I was right.

So to add to our holiday celebration, I thought it'd be fun to watch a pure Parisienne turn up her nose at something so very American and so definitively not healthy/organic/natural/meant-for-human-consumption. I had SocialButterfly bring me a box of Rice Krispies and a bag of marshmallows from New York since it's pretty difficult to find such non-French processed sugars and saturated fats over here.

Let me reiterate the fact that I have never before made Rice Krispie Treats in my life even though I've shoved tons of them in my pie hole over the years. I stood in SexySultry's kitchen melting the butter and watched it starting to brown. I already anticipated the disaster that was about to ensue. I turned down the heat on the electric stove, added the marshmallows and phoned TooNice in Atlanta who has two children under ten years of age.

"Hello?"

"Hi. I have a quick non-emergency emergency-like question to ask you."

"Okay."

"What do you do to OW I JUST BURNED MYSELF how can you... Why won't my marshmallows melt?! I mean, they have been in this pan for almost 10 minutes and they're soft-ish but refuse to disintegrate into fluff."

"Huh?"

"I'm trying to make Rice Krispie Treats for the first time in my life. I can conquer complicated crap like white chocolate and dark chocolate mousse in layers with home-made crème anglaise and a raspberry coulis from scratch! I've seen four-year-olds make this crap practically unsupervised so WTF am I doing wrong?!"

TooNice burst into a fit of hysterical laughter. (PS - She's the one who rescued me when I burned down the kitchen, covered the rest of the previously white interior of the house in a greasy black film, and had to go to the hospital's burn ward the day before Thanksgiving in 2008 on the East Coast where I was not trying to cook something complicated but just trying to heat oil which exploded into flames to fry up pre-packaged jalapeño poppers from TGIFridays. Please refrain from judging me. This was before the French Skinny.)

"Did you add enough butter?"

"What's my name?! Please! Of course I added enough butter. Butter is second only to bacon in my world!"

"What are you doing right now?"

"Adding more butter."

More laughter. Some polite chit-chat about what she's doing, how the kids are doing, her parents' impending visit for the holidays...

"Okay, so it's been 5 minutes. The butter I added has completely melted but the marshmallows are still in ball shape. Maybe the wok isn't hot enough but it's an electric stove and when I had the heat up higher everything started to burn. So now I have a huge mess on my hands, a layer of burnt stickiness on the bottom of the wok and a melted spatula that I have to replace yet STILL my marshmallows won't melt!"

"You're doing this in a wok?! Are you crazy?!"

"She doesn't have any other cookware big enough."

"Try putting them in the microwave then."

SexySultry does not like to touch food with her hands and hates to cook. So the kitchen is a little limited to say the least. I started opening up cabinets trying to find a suitable microwaveable container.

"What should I put them in?" I wondered aloud.

"Something that's not metal. And microwave safe."

Thanks, Sherlock. But I suppose her lack of faith in me is understandable. We promptly hung up the phone as I decided to put the first 5oz of marshmallows in a glass bowl in the microwave and wait to do the second 5oz later as I couldn't find anything big enough. I put 2 minutes on the timer and went about washing the gook off the melted spatula to see if it was salvageable.

Within 5-10 seconds, I (luckily) had the bright idea to check the marshmallows. CRAP! I quickly opened the microwave door upon discovering that the marshmallows had expanded to 800 times their original size. I pulled the bowl out and tried to stir the mess around with a wooden spoon and get everything back into the bowl.

Guess what?! STILL NOT MELTED.

After exploding the second batch of marshmallows I gave up and decided to throw everything back into the wok on low heat and add the Rice Krispies anyway. I mashed everything around with my bare hands (not a good idea) and added a full bag of M&M's for color (also not a good idea.) The candy melted and the mixture became a mess of colors and at no point in time did the marshmallows resemble anything remotely close to fluff.

But I was close to tears at this point and had to finish what I started before I realized that SexySultry owns no brownie pans. No big deal. I improvised with a bread pan.

I give you, Rice Krispie Loaf...



Sometimes I really LOVE photoshop.

PS - I was completely sober.

PPS - SexySultry actually liked it (or so she said.) She even took some to work the next day and shared with her very-French, very-opinionated coworkers (but maybe it was just to have a good laugh or to prove the ridiculousness to them in case they didn't believe her.) I would've liked to have been a fly on the wall for those 10 minutes!!