When Food Gets Ugly

Sometimes you just have "one of those" cooking days, when nothing you do turns out quite right. If you're lucky, you manage to time those days so that they don't coincide with important events. Sometimes you're not that lucky.

Molly's baptism is tomorrow morning and we wanted to have a little celebratory brunch afterwards. Grandma kindly offered to have the brunch at her house and even promised to make her much-loved "Christmas" breakfast bake. So, I said I'd make up all the side dishes and bring them over on Sunday morning. I figured out what I was going to make a week or so ago -- my apple bundt cake, some blueberry muffins, and a nice fruit salad.

Things got off to a bad start when, in spite of having taken a half day of vacation from work, I didn't manage to get the grocery shopping done on Friday, like I had planned. This meant that I had to venture out and fight the weekend crowds at the grocery store, which always makes me cranky. Max came along to help me and at least provided some comic relief when he managed to grab a kiwi and, before I could stop him, yelled "BALL!" and threw it across the aisle. Needless to say, we ended up buying one more kiwi than we needed. ;)

Once we made it back home I wanted to get the food preparation started. So I started up the apple bundt cake, threw it together in good time, and put it in the oven to bake while we had dinner. It was all nice and golden brown when I took it out of the oven and it smelled wonderful. I've made this cake at least a dozen times -- usually it turns out great, but every once in a while it doesn't want to home out of the pan. This was one of those times. I ended up having to peel a couple of top chunks out of the pan and try to jigsaw puzzle them back on to the rest of the cake. Argh! So, now I'm stuck with a cake that will taste perfectly fine, but really looks like a mess.

I left the cake to finish cooling and moved on to the fruit salad. Dad helped prep most of the salad and it was looking pretty tasty ... until I made the strategic error of putting blueberries in it (what was I thinking?). Once we mixed it up and put it in the pan, the blueberries had turned all the other fruit a dingy shade of purple. Once again, it tasted perfectly fine, but really didn't look particularly appetizing.

I moved on to the muffins, thinking that they were pretty foolproof (again, I've made these before and they're always great). For some reason I thought it was perfectly acceptable to throw the blueberries in when I mixed the dry ingredients into the batter, instead of folding them in at the very last minute. I was painfully reminded WHY that's the proper way to do things when my batter turned a lovely shade of purple.

So, it appears that our friends and family will be stuck with cobbled together bundt cake, some dirty-looking fruit salad, and purple muffins for breakfast tomorrow. Maybe it's a good thing that Molly can't eat table food yet anyway. Sorry Molly -- I'll try to make it up to you with your birthday cake!