Meringue Mishaps and Christmas Crazies
A belated but sincere Happy Holidays to everyone... though, I guess it's not entirely belated, as New Year's is just around the corner! Thought I'd share a couple of stories from the past few days for everyone's amusement. The first one is from a couple of days before Christmas, and the second chronicles our Christmas Day shenanigans. Enjoy!
So, angelus7988 and I were doing some holiday baking tonight (December 23rd... okay, now it's the 24th, at the time of this writing). Among the things we're baking to give as gifts are peppermint meringue kisses, dyed with red-and-white stripes.
The technique for making stripes on meringues is to take your empty piping bag and paint stripes down the inside with gel food coloring before loading the bag with your meringue mixture. I'd explained this idea to angelus7988 in vague terms, but when he came into the kitchen and saw me with the paintbrush and food coloring, he seemed a bit unclear on how it was supposed to work, saying he was still trying to get his head around the process.
"It's just like toothpaste," I explained.
He just sort of stared at me for a second, perplexed.
"...Did you think the stripes went all the way up the tube?!"
The embarrassment on his face was all the answer I needed.
Though, as it turned out, the last dumb of the night was mine. Remember how I said we were making "peppermint meringues," hence the red-and-white striping? Well, they ended up being "festive holiday-colored meringues," because in order for them to be "peppermint meringues," I would've had to have remembered to add the peppermint extract. So yeah. -_-
So this year we did Christmas with angelus7988's family and step-family, staying at his dad's house for Christmas Eve, then opening presents and going to his dad's girlfriend's parents' house for Christmas dinner. (It was ham, which confirmed for me that, no, I was right, I don't like ham. I smiled and choked it down.)
angelus7988's relatives are really nice people, with the caveat that some of them are absolutely batshit. Somehow the conversation turned to gun control (cementing the truism that you should never discuss politics or religion with relatives), whereupon I discovered that Nick's step-uncle is a nutjob conspiracy theorist. As in, among other things, believing that all of the school shootings and other public mass shootings since Columbine, up to and including the recent Newtown tragedy, were deliberately engineered by the government to accomplish some sort of nebulous political goals, like gun control or something. (To which I replied, if that were somehow the case, they're doing an awfully shitty job of it, given the current state of our gun laws.)
Notwithstanding how genuinely and surprisingly angry that particular manifestation of lunatic conspiracy-theorism made me, it was a fascinating experience, discovering someone in real life who has these bizarrely deluded ideas. I mean, I read about people like this on the internet all the time, but when you only see this sort of thing online, it occupies this sort of fuzzy unreality of the theoretical. It was a paradigm-shattering experience to meet a conspiracy-theorist nutball. The frightening thing was, when the conversation shifted to more neutral topics, he seemed perfectly normal.
So, other than that, and the failure of angelus7988's dad and dad's girlfriend to take seriously the special-needs stepbrother's developing alcoholism and stop giving him alcohol, it was a fun holiday.
So, angelus7988 and I were doing some holiday baking tonight (December 23rd... okay, now it's the 24th, at the time of this writing). Among the things we're baking to give as gifts are peppermint meringue kisses, dyed with red-and-white stripes.
The technique for making stripes on meringues is to take your empty piping bag and paint stripes down the inside with gel food coloring before loading the bag with your meringue mixture. I'd explained this idea to angelus7988 in vague terms, but when he came into the kitchen and saw me with the paintbrush and food coloring, he seemed a bit unclear on how it was supposed to work, saying he was still trying to get his head around the process.
"It's just like toothpaste," I explained.
He just sort of stared at me for a second, perplexed.
"...Did you think the stripes went all the way up the tube?!"
The embarrassment on his face was all the answer I needed.
Though, as it turned out, the last dumb of the night was mine. Remember how I said we were making "peppermint meringues," hence the red-and-white striping? Well, they ended up being "festive holiday-colored meringues," because in order for them to be "peppermint meringues," I would've had to have remembered to add the peppermint extract. So yeah. -_-
So this year we did Christmas with angelus7988's family and step-family, staying at his dad's house for Christmas Eve, then opening presents and going to his dad's girlfriend's parents' house for Christmas dinner. (It was ham, which confirmed for me that, no, I was right, I don't like ham. I smiled and choked it down.)
angelus7988's relatives are really nice people, with the caveat that some of them are absolutely batshit. Somehow the conversation turned to gun control (cementing the truism that you should never discuss politics or religion with relatives), whereupon I discovered that Nick's step-uncle is a nutjob conspiracy theorist. As in, among other things, believing that all of the school shootings and other public mass shootings since Columbine, up to and including the recent Newtown tragedy, were deliberately engineered by the government to accomplish some sort of nebulous political goals, like gun control or something. (To which I replied, if that were somehow the case, they're doing an awfully shitty job of it, given the current state of our gun laws.)
Notwithstanding how genuinely and surprisingly angry that particular manifestation of lunatic conspiracy-theorism made me, it was a fascinating experience, discovering someone in real life who has these bizarrely deluded ideas. I mean, I read about people like this on the internet all the time, but when you only see this sort of thing online, it occupies this sort of fuzzy unreality of the theoretical. It was a paradigm-shattering experience to meet a conspiracy-theorist nutball. The frightening thing was, when the conversation shifted to more neutral topics, he seemed perfectly normal.
So, other than that, and the failure of angelus7988's dad and dad's girlfriend to take seriously the special-needs stepbrother's developing alcoholism and stop giving him alcohol, it was a fun holiday.