chocolate covered failures.

Yesterday was a very trying day. From the moment I woke up to the time I went to bed, nothing I did seemed to go right. Ever have one of those days?

It all started when I woke up later than I wanted to. 10 am, not too bad. just enough time to make some shrimp and grits for breakfast. That idea turned out to be a disaster. Ingredients were flying everywhere, things weren't tasting like they should, and the whole thing wasn't worth the effort it took to make . . . and I usually make a decent shrimp and grits. So after taking longer that I wanted in the kitchen, I was running behind for my shower. And since I was behind on taking a shower, The hubby came home right when I got out and we had an errand to run that day during his lunch break. So, that snowballed for a while until we got home.

When we finally got home later that we should've, I decided to go back into the kitchen and de-stress. I figured that the best way to do that was to finally make some Southern pralines. This recipe seemed easy enough and, since I wanted my pralines to be chewy, perfectly fit what I was looking for.

Problems started arising when I realized that I didn't have the right ingredients. Well, that was no biggie since I always sub a lot of my cooking with this or that. Heavy cream was a major ingredient in the recipe and I didn't have any. What I did have, however, was a big ole box of store brand, powdered skim milk from a recipe I tried a while back. So, not only was I subbing CREAM with NON-FAT dairy, I was using a CHEAP substitute POWDER to boot. Needless to say, I was wondering if this was a bad Idea after all.

I pushed on, though, despite my reservations. Despite adding too much vanilla, adding salt, and misreading the recipe. By the time I realized that I had missed the final step of stirring the pot to crystallize the boiling sugar, my concoction was beyond making pralines . . . it had cooked into caramel.

At this point, I reached the "I-don't-give-a-fuck-anymore" mode. My pralines were ruined, I wasted my precious Georgia-grown pecans my sister gave me, and I hadn't even gotten dinner ready. All the failures seemed to accumulate to this point and I was just not having it. However, I wan't so far gone that I still didn't want to salvage what was left on my counter.

Off I went to Walmart and purchased a couple bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and a single Lindt's White Choclate bar. I proceeded to melt the chocolate down and mix it with some coconut oil to help temper the chocolate. Then one by one, I covered the pralines-turned-caramels first in the milk chocolate, then drizzled it with white. When I ran out of the milk for dipping, I used the white instead.

In the end, my hopes for pralines were just a distant memory. I've since found a good tutorial for my next attempt on making these confections. While these milk chocolate pecan turtles turned out to be an adequate consolation, it still is a far cry to what they were supposed to be. Failure is failure, no matter how you look at it. *sigh*

But, what better way to fix failure than to cover it with lots of chocolate?