Disatrous Salted Butter Caramel Cake

** Strangely, this post contains BREAKING BAD SPOILERS so if you haven't watched it to the end and plan on doing so, this one ain't for you **

Did you watch Breaking Bad? I had tried to watch it and in the way that I do with anything that requires more than 5 minutes of my attention, I gave up. Not because it was bad – because it was great! No, just because I had SO much to catch up on and it was SO overwhelming and so I gave up.

But then, everyone started to talk about “the ending” and people were all excited and saying things like “TV WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN” and so I watched and watched and WATCHED. One day, I watched 13 hours of the stuff.

And what I discovered was this: in the end, it all revolved around bowel movements; that one fateful shit.

Maybe Skylar had brewed some very strong coffee for after the meal. Maybe the cartel had slipped some laxative into Hank’s morning cuppa, mistaking it for ricin. Or maybe, Hank was on some new Hollywood diet pills; just shitting out all the fat from Sky’s cooking.

I don’t know.

But what I DO know is that had Hank not needed to drop a load at the dinner party then Walt & Co would probably be on their way flying first class to the Czech Republic to open up a new car wash. Him and Sky would bathe in methylamine, snort lines of homemade pink cocaine and wife swap with Jesse and Andrea.

While we’re talking about crap, my housemate has bought some wet wipes that sit next to the toilet. We’re rationed to one per poo but MY WORD it feels as if I have suddenly become a billionaire.

So, let’s bring it away from shit and back onto chemistry.

Cooking caramel for this cake made me feel like I was cooking meth, as can all baking because well, um, it is CHEMISTRY. I remember one guy on the Great British Bake Off who was very into manipulating ingredients with clever boffin techniques and I think he won so WOW, this is chemistry: call me Walter White Chocolate Chip or Jesse Pink Cupcake coz this chemistry chick is here to stay!

Please see above a photo of the making of caramel, which was just one of the many things that went wrong with this recipe.

The final DISASTER was when I followed the instructions to "turn out the cake", which was MEANT to be slightly uncooked. So the top photo illustrates what happened and is also the reason why I am going to be a responsible blogger and not post the recipe, ever.

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Disgusting Peppered "Steak" Sandwich

It doesn't look really bad. But it is. 

The disclaimer at the bottom of my last post got me thinking; I was sure that I had had to provide some kind of food-related hazard warning before. Lo and behold, after a search through my blogging archives (the blogs that I write and then never post, due to being lazy and uninspired), I found the disclaimer in question.

Ready, Marty McFly? We’re going back in time to April 2012, when my life looked like this:

"Disclaimer: Before I start this particular blog let me just tell you that the resultant meal you will eat after toiling for actually not very long is fucking disgusting. So, please feel free to disregard this one and move along.

As usual, quite some time has gone by since my last update. It is now nearly May which is sort of nearly half way through the year and so it’s basically nearly 2013 and I have wasted all of 2012 by eating Milka bars and refreshing my Twitter home page.

Talking of 2012, has anyone been watching the Beeb’s Twenty Twelve? (I still find it funny to ask my “readers” these questions; it makes me feel all self-important as if I am actually writing a real blog). Anyway, it’s bloody brilliant. In it, my boss is wonderfully portrayed by the excellent Jessica Hynes. That’s a joke, obviously, but not a very good one. I can’t be arsed.

So, here is a list of a few things that have recently made my life a bit shit:

A few months ago I over-enthusiastically told an old friend that we should just FORGET about emails and Facebook and actually write to each other. She said “OK” but really, I bet she was thinking “Yeah right. You can’t even find the time to reply to a text with the word “yes” so how are you going to actually buy some paper and an envelope and then sit down and WRITE something”.

If that was what she was thinking, she was right because I never did write a thing and now the price of stamps has fucking quadrupled or something…so, that showed me.

I stupidly stumbled upon these pictures and spent a long time looking at them, whilst eating digestives and pulling at the fat on my cheeks.

I am accustomed to chatting to people in the kitchen at work and then agreeing to do something that they haven’t even put pressure on me to do. One such case was when I agreed to help a lawyer-cum-writer-cum-occasional-tv-commentator prepare a case against the UK government. No biggie then.

I should have known better because after spending 24 years with myself I know that I am lazy, unmotivated, prone to u-turns on commitments and always panicking. True to form, here I am with a long list of Directives that I do not understand but pretended at the time that I did. You will now understand why I decided to write this blog.

One final thing that was shit this week was the sandwich I made yesterday. Asda has a period, once every couple of months, where luxury pizzas, Activia yoghurts and Covent Garden soups are all on offer. This is the BEST time ever and I will elbow children, pregnant women and pensioners out of the way just to reach that last pizza. Even if I can’t fit everything I have bought into my fridge, it’s okay because I just pop it right into the oven and have an extra meal or two that day.

This week, the deal was off so I sullenly moped around the other aisles to see what other offers there were. I found some Quorn peppered steaks for £1 and dolefully chucked them into my wheely basket".

The offending item.

(this is where the post ends)

I obviously never posted this meal because I never got round to finishing the story. It goes like this:

I know, I KNOW that Quorn products aren’t exactly like meat. I knoooow. However, some are better than others, as will be demonstrated in the coming weeks with a post on the best veggie chilli I have ever made or even tasted. These bloody peppered “steaks” are just awful though and I don’t think it has anything to do with my cooking.

This is more of a health warning than a good old recipe but if you are an insane vegetarian who would like to pay some money to feel really sick, then get a “steak”, some rocket, tomato and bread and bundle it all together.

You’re so welcome!

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Smarties Cookies

Where do I begin? I’ve already tried to begin an “update” blog like this many, many times BUT like I just said…where do I begin? I can’t even be bothered to go onto the blog to see where I last left you guys (ha ha, guys, readers, of which I have none).

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that everything I wrote about before now eg: oh, my life in London is so tragic! and I keep making an arse of myself in a job that actually pays me enough to afford a room! seems pretty cool and glamorous now. The kind of life I wished I was living was the closest I've ever been to the life I was living! Only, I didn’t realise it at the time.

I remember when I first found out that the Olympics were going to be held in London. It was 2005 and I was (I’ve been trying to calculate this for 10 minutes but my festive drunk head just can’t work it out)….17. I was 17. I remember doing a much quicker calculation to work out how old I would be in 2012. I would be 24. I am 24!

I had all these ideas about how I would probably have a fit, successful boyfriend. I would reside in London and we would share a flat together. The flat would be really sleek and modern and definitely in a really good area of London. Not a REALLY good area like Kensington but a realistic area. Like Islington. I would also have a job but it wouldn’t be a stressy job and I definitely wouldn’t have to commute. I’d come home and cook an incredibly complex three-course meal and we’d eat with our like-minded friends over candlelight and talk about music and films and art and our opinions would all be intelligent and similar. We'd all feel so....at home, wanted and belonging to something.

I would suddenly have changed body shape and instead of looking really clumpy and uncomfortable in a pencil skirt, I'd look sleek and business-like. My hair would no longer be frizzy and limp, as I would have presumably conjured up £10,000 of disposable income for a hair transplant. All my bad personality traits (I won’t list them here as that is surely a very negative exercise) would have magically disappeared (I also paid for a therapist) and I would suddenly be generous, accepting, wildly sociable, not constantly anxious and paranoid and loved by everyone. Shit. Can you now work out my bad personality traits?

So basically, it didn’t happen.

I tried to make some cookies today and they also failed. I know that it is always proper to credit your recipes but I got these cookies from a really nice blogger and I’m pretty sure that the recipe is fine and it’s just me that fucked them all up but I’m hesitating as to whether to link here.

Upon first tasting of the cookies, I said “these taste like sausages”. My mum and brother did not agree with this. Once the cookies had cooled down, I said “these taste of nothing at all”. My mum and brother remained silent, which is, I think, a sign that these cookies taste of nothing at all.

I wondered whether I had put too much baking powder or bicarbonate of soda in the mixture because I have sometimes heard that this can ruin the flavour. However, as I don’t know what too much baking powder or bicarbonate of soda tastes like, it’s difficult to accurately say that this was the problem.

Try these at your peril. Perhaps if you are really bored or in desperate need of something to nibble on eg: all your cardboard boxes have disappeared and you need something else to chew on ASAP. A good alternative, I feel, would be to simply bypass the cookie part and just eat a tube of Smarties.

One more thing. The 24 year old me of my dreams would 1) not have made anything that turned out wrong and 2) if, by some freak accident, she HAD made something substandard, she wouldn’t waste the calories by eating them all.

I am currently eating the 5^th cookie of the most disgusting batch of cookies I have ever made or tasted.

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