Chapter 27 Bettina Has A Baking Day continued

How It Tasted

Berry Pie

Best pie ever! The crust was rick and flaky, the filling perfectly sweetened with an A+ texture… (can I pack more superlatives into this description?)

In short this pie was excellent—without a doubt the best Bettina dessert I’ve ever made. That’s doubly amazing as the pie looked such a mess going into the oven with its patched crust and scanty filling. It certainly proves the point that no Bettina dish should be judged solely on looks—the ultimate test comes only after placing a bite in your mouth.

Sour Cream Cookies

These cookies looked fantastic but tasted awful—the complete reverse of the rather sad looking but scrumptious pie described above.

And it’s no exaggeration to use the word awful—the dry-as-dust-rounds had no taste other than that provided by the raisins (which DH and Son surreptitiously picked out and snuck into their mouth).

“Children love cookies,” declares Bettina, but only a family of pups would enjoy gnawing these horrid little biscuits. They were that bad, that terrible, and fit more for kindling a fire than feeding to guests.

Tomato Jelly with Boiled Salad Dressing

Filip: [spitting into his napkin]: I’m sorry, I can’t eat this.

That pretty well sums it up—NO ONE could eat this dish, and adding it to the Do Not Attempt Again list would assuredly draw cheers from my family. They were shocked by the look, taste, and texture of this supposed “jelly”, and even more appalled that I dared to serve it up in the first place.

Thanks no doubt to the extra water I added, the tomato solids sank to the bottom of the glass cups—and when I flipped them over I was faced with two inches of faintly tomato-tasting red stuff suspended above an layer of clear goo. Unfortunately the boiled dressing heaped on top didn’t help one bit—in tasted every bit as foul as the tomato stuff and, thanks to its slipperiness, was almost impossible to scrape off.

Doughnuts

Filip: You made bagels!

It’s rather unfortunate that I didn’t--bagels (homemade or otherwise) would have received a better reception from the family.

Really, the taste of these homemade doughnuts wasn’t terrible—in fact, they had almost no taste at all. The modern doughnut has little in common with these odd rounds of fried dough—they were plain as punch, slightly greasy, and (I imagine) truly horrible if sampled the next day. A layer of sugar glaze or chocolate frosting might have been helpful—but in the end I ‘helped’ myself by simply dumping them in the trash.

Would I Make This Again?

Is this a trick question?

Obviously (with the exception of the pie) the answer is a big fat NO—these dishes were not only an assault on all five senses but obnoxiously complicated to prepare.

Really, these so-called treats have only limited use as far as I can tell: chow fit a revival of Fear Factor, or to stop the Walking Dead in their tracks. Serving this stuff to guests would be enough to drive them from the table—in fact, out the door and every step of the way home!