Recently I came across a bagel recipe linked by Dean at Textism. I always read Dean's recipes with curiosity, as he seems to be a food connoisseur. This time I thought "that can't be so hard. I'll try it myself."
My problems started at the grocery store where I couldn't find potato flour or malt syrup. Once I started work on the recipe, they continued when my first attempt at yeast growing failed (note to self: lukewarm means hot, not a little better than room temperature).
Finally getting a dough that rose, I thought I was on the right track. When I went to separate it into bagel size pieces however, it flattened right out. No problem, the recipe says let it rise for fifteen more minutes, so I thought I'd be ok.
I started poaching the bagels, however they kept reminding me of the bald rodent in Kimpossible. Not looking so good. I brushed them with egg, threw on some sesame seeds, and popped them in the oven.
Now two side notes. 1) When the last five things you've cooked in the oven have come out slightly more cooked than you expected (read burnt) maybe the problem isn't you. Maybe when the oven says 400, it means fires of hell. 2) When the recipe takes you to almost eleven at night and number one occurs, removing the smoke detectors will help keep your neighbors (who go to bed at 8) from slashing your tires the next morning.
As you might be able to guess, my bagels ended up burnt and my smoke detectors were blaring. To make matters worse they didn't look like bagels, they looked like pretzels.
The moral of the story here is that not only is Dean a PHP genius, but he also must have some Julia Child in him. Me? I'll stay out of the kitchen from now on.
I was up past 11 making pretzels once, and they are kinda like bagels in the way they are boiled and then baked. And my oven was broken, except it was leaking gas. So the pretzels came out underdone and I almost killed the family.
Other than that, it was a typical day.