Julia Child, I Am Not

I subscribe to a blog called Dozen Flours. It's written by a woman named Julia who is, as best I can tell, a genius when it comes to baking. I got pulled in a year and a half ago by dreams of her yummy creations and haven't left. Unfortunately, as a diabetic, I also haven't tried cooking any of them. Until now.

You see, back in May, Julia posted a blog about the website Oh Nuts, which had graciously offered to let her sample anything she wanted to try from the site. After perusing the numerous delicacies offered, she chose the Mint Cookie Malted Milk Balls. After, I believe, eating a fair amount on their lonesome, she took the rest and turned them into brownies and posted the recipe and photos on her blog. Photos that would make your mouth water prior to tasting them, they looked that good!

Once Julia had made her selection, Oh Nuts offered her something else. The chance to award her readers with one pound of something from their website. One pound of anything the winner wanted. In order to sign up, you needed to respond to the blog and then post what you'd choose. Given the photos, my drooling lips, and the desire to try baking something, it was easy to say that I'd want the Milk Balls so that I could try the brownie recipe.

Unbelievably, I won, and a few weeks later my very own package of Mint Cookie Malted Milk Balls arrived at my doorstep.

I printed off the recipe and set about gathering the items I would need, among them good, unsweetened chocolate- specifically, not Baker's brand, which took a bit of shopping- and Peppermint extract, which I kept forgetting I did not have in the house. (Actually, I did have it, but was unable to locate it until two weeks after I purchased the new. Murphy's Law.) Finally, I had all the pieces, but it took a bit to find the time.

Time hit me full force Sunday afternoon and I finally got my chance to try baking, Julia-style.

I grabbed the recipe, read it three times through, pulled all the ingredients and put them on the counter, and set out to assemble. First up, melting chocolate with butter and beating eggs with sugar.

Already, we had an issue. Since I'm diabetic, the two cups of sugar were going to be an impossibility for me-- unless of course I wanted to make them and then give them away, which I was completely unwilling to do. I'd only been thinking about them for months now! So, I had to substitute the sugar with Splenda. I was worried from the get-go, but as called for in the recipe, after five minutes of beating on high, light and fluffy they were.

The chocolate had melted nicely, and was cooling on the stove top. Short Person was greasing the foil lined baking pan, and I? I was a mess of hurried preparation. Did I mention that LJS was also barbecuing Salmon and Steelhead for dinner and that I was to make a salad and slice tomatoes to go with it?

Everything sat on the counter as I threw things together in cycles. A chop here, a stir there, I was feeling like Betty Crocker gone crazy! I was gettin' it done. I was the kitchen queen and pretty damn proud of it.

Lettuce cut, cheese on top, ham diced, I took a break from that, deemed the chocolate sauce cooled enough-- incidentally, butter and unsweetened chocolate do not taste good-- and started stirring it in slowly to the egg mixture, until finally, the concoction looked like a bunch of chocolate mixed with eggs. Not quite a cocoa brown. More like a cocoa brown with fleckles.

The next item on the recipe was to add the peppermint, salt, vanilla, and flour. Check, check, check, and slowly... check. I set it aside for a minute to chop the milk balls and then turned back to the mixture thinking, already, that something had gone horribly wrong. As I mixed in the milk balls, I noticed the batter had a very sticky quality to it. It reminded me of the type of batter used for drop biscuits and I thought that couldn't be good.

However, I had no photo to tell me that this wasn't how it was supposed to be, finished mixing, and then spread the batter into the pan, wondering all the while how I was supposed to smooth it around, on foil no less, to get it smooth. Then, I threw it in the oven.

We ate dinner, which was wonderful, and after 25 minutes, I pulled the brownies out of the oven to cool. They smelled WONDERFUL and neither Short Person or I could wait to try them. She'd been waiting all day since one of her groovy dolls was apparently having a birthday and the brownies were the closest thing to a cake we were making. She gathered her stuffed animals and sat in anticipation, asking every 10 seconds if they were cooled enough to eat.

After an hour, I said yes, and we went to sample a bite. I cut a piece of the corner off, opened my mouth, which was already anticipating the mint chocolate mix that would melt in my mouth causing instant mouth-gasm, and bit down. There was a mouth-gasm alright, of the horrified kind! Something had gone horribly wrong. There was a taste in my mouth that reminded me of gravy when the flour hadn't gotten dissolved all the way. They were awful.

I keep telling myself that the important thing to remember is that I tried. In reality, I think the important thing to remember is that Julia Child... I am not.

But I give a great amount of thanks to Julia of Dozen Flours for her scrumptious recipes and equal thanks to Oh Nuts for the opportunity to try their product, which I sampled a great many of prior to baking (if you can call it that). The malt balls were wonderful!