I am no Julia Child, Martha Stewart, or even Rachael Ray

There is kind of a running theme when it comes to me and the kitchen: I mess things up.  I am usually okay when it comes to break and bake cookies or boxed cake, but anything more complex than that is guaranteed to cause me trouble.  One year I decided to bake a cake for Anthony's 20th birthday.  I had to top the polka dot fondant cake that he had baked for me for my Birthday earlier that year. It was a funfetti cake and it was adorable but I had to up him by making his cake completely homemade.

So, I worked real hard working with fondant for the first time and I thought the outcome was pretty good...











...until we cut it.  It was a crumbly mess and it tasted like vanilla flavored cornbread. Yum!


So since then I have been known for my homemade kitchen mess ups.  One year Beth and I baked my mom a homemade German chocolate cake. It turned out delicious but that was only after the batter overflowed into the bottom on Mom's new oven. We had a miniature cake, burnt to a crisp that I got to climb in the over in and dig out later.  I've made a pineapple upside down cake that fell apart when we flipped it because it wasn't done in the center.  And this year for Anthony's Birthday I made some Samoa (caramel delight for those of us from the south) cup cakes.  I made the icing myself but went for the boxed cake as to decrease the likelihood of screwing them up.  But I managed to miss read 1 1/2 cups as 11 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, so needless to say the icing was super sweet! (No worries, I noticed the mistake before I got all 11 cups in there and I doubled the recipe so it wasn't really that bad) They turned out pretty good, I must say:

So anyway, My Dad's Birthday is next Wednesday and I will be back in Lexington by then so I decided that for his gift (because he never wants anything, he is so hard to buy for!) I would make his favorite desserts: Lemon Ice Box Pie and Pralines and Cream Ice Cream.  Don't worry, I had no plans of making the ice cream myself, just the pralines which proved to be hard enough on their own. The Lemon Ice Box pie seemed easy enough (see recipe here).  No baking, just mixing and pouring...I can do that, right?  Well I ended up pouring the fresh squeezed lemon juice into the mix seeds included.  So that was a hassle digging them out but the pie turned out pretty good.

 

It looks good anyway, we've yet to have a bite.

But the pralines weren't as successful.  I should have known that it was a bad sign that the article from Southern Living with the recipe suggested alternatives for if your pralines don't turn out quite right.  I followed the directions exactly, but the pralines just wouldn't set up.  I'm gonna blame this disaster on the 20+ year old candy thermometer that I used.  Luckily, it didn't matter too much because I scrapped them off of the wax paper and into some vanilla ice cream.

The moral of the story is I am no Julia Child, Martha Steward, or even Rachael Ray.  Which is okay with me, as long as no one is afraid to eat what I bake :p