MussoLOLen is Always Right! |

I figured that it’s about time I learn how to cook a certain dish, so I said that I’d make the seafood paella, which we will have for Christmas dinner tonight. My mom insisted that I cook it this morning while the crab and the prawns and the shrimp were still fresh from the market. It was only 10 a.m. and my brain wasn’t quite awake yet. Thus, “Lauren making the paella” ended up being Lauren poking at the seafood with a spatula, Lauren shuddering with horror at the squid tentacles, and Lauren watching in amusement as the prawns turn from dark blue to orange–while the maids did the actual work. :P

If this were the 19th century nobody would want to marry me because I’m simply too lazy to take the effort to make an actual dish from scratch. I am so not a domestic woman. I have never cooked for anyone in my life. Why should I, anyway? Just because social norms say that women have to be good in the kitchen doesn’t mean that I ought to don an apron and unleash my culinary skillz at every visitor that sets foot in the house. Admittedly, I do feel a lot less like a woman because I can’t cook for shit. I don’t like kids, either. I suppose this womanly impotence that I’m going through right now is a lot like what men feel when their psycho ex-girlfriends cut their balls off in their sleep.

Merry Christmas, everyone. :D

Every now and then I obsess over a feminine craft for a short period of time. A good chunk of last year was spent on crochet. I churned out doilies like crazy and dreamed of making random crocheted stuff to sell – until I got too lazy to find the proper yarn for a colorful, flower rug I was making for my room.

Today, I find myself enamored by another domestic hobby: making chocolates.

The idea came up when Pat gave me a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans for Valentine’s Day. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m fueled by coffee and addicted to chocolate; having both coffee and chocolate in one treat was heavenly. When I went to Candy Corner at Gateway to buy my own bag later on, I realized that I was too cheap Php 130 (approximately $2) for a hundred grams. Why pay that much when I can probably make it myself?

A few days ago, I asked a friend of mine for a huge favor and promised her homemade chocolate-covered coffee beans in return. Since I need to get the chocolate to her by Thursday, I took the extra effort to wake up before noon today and go with my mom to Chocolate Lover, the only place in the Philippines where you can buy ingredients needed for cooking with chocolate. For the coffee beans, I headed to a nearby grocery store and got 400 grams.

With the help of Pat and the instructions of my mom, I tried a hand at making chocolate-covered coffee beans this afternoon. Naturally, the process wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be. The constant stirring needed by the melting chocolate made my arm ache, and it took a long while for the chocolate to really melt. Covering the coffee beans in chocolate wasn’t easy, either. For some reason, I couldn’t simply dip the beans in the chocolate and wait for it to form a perfect, round shape on its own. The chocolate just kind of spread all over the plate, making it look more like a chocolate with a lump, and it tasted like too much coffee and not enough chocolate.

The problem was eventually solved by pouring the chocolate in a mold for bonbons and putting several coffee beans in it, resulting in a bonbon like the perfect mix of chocolate and coffee. It helped that the chocolate was already good to eat alone; it’s sweet but not too sweet, and it doesn’t taste cheap. Pat and I couldn’t stop eating the first batch, and it took a lot of will power to stop eating them and start working on the chocolates for my friend.

I’m not sure what kind of coffee I got for the chocolate. Whatever it is, it’s very potent stuff. I was real giddy and hyper for about an hour after devouring the chocolates but as with any drug, the crash is just as intense. I feel like a hungover socialite the morning after 48 hours of partying hard. I’d love to collapse onto my bed and take a long sweet nap right now, but I’m eating dinner out with my family soon.

So now that I’ve used myself as a test subject and discovered that my creation tastes wonderful (and makes you crash hard), I can conclude that my chocolate-covered coffee bean experiment turned out to be a success. I’m thinking of maybe selling them, and if I get borded enough I probably will. What do you think?