New Frontiers in the Culinary Arts

I love to cook. It relaxes me, pumps me up, and allows me to be creative. My best cooking moments revolve around recipes I've made up on my own, but since I hardly ever write them down, they're usually unrepeatable. I like it that way. Even when I'm working with a recipe, I tend to view it merely as a list of suggestions rather than a set of instructions, and normally that ends up really well. But sometimes I make mistakes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... (drum roll, please)...

THE CHOCOLATE STRAWBONION CAKE. Ta-ta-ta-daaaaaaaa!!! (You may commence making gagging noises now.)

Here's a picture of this delicious-looking monstrosity. Yummy, right?



Wrong. Why? Well, let's start by dissecting the name. Chocolate. Yummy! Nothing yucky about that. But wait. What is this strange second word? Strawbonion? What on earth is "strawbonion?" Hehe. Ha. Um.....

Well, it all started with a dirty cutting board. (All good stories start with that sentence.) I was cooking over at Cookie's house for our friend's birthday party and she had just finished chopping onions for the dinner, but I wasn't really paying attention. White onions. No colored residue. I wanted to chop strawberries to make pretty floral arrangements on top of the delicious chocolate cake, and I grabbed the (apparently) clean cutting board, chopped the strawberries, and then left them there while I waited for the cakes to cool off. I vaguely remember a lesson in freshman biology about something called osmosis, and i can now safely report that this fine scientific principle works exactly like it's supposed to. By the time I placed the strawberries on top of the cake, they'd morphed into something else entirely: a strawbonion. This exotic new fregtable looks like a strawberry, but has the pungent flavor of an onion. I can hardly explain how disgusting this was on a chocolate cake.

Luckily, most girls, especially when congregated in large groups, would eat cat shit if it were chocolate coated, so the cake disappeared with alarming speed. And being ever optimistic in the culinary arts, I think that this strawbonion idea is not entirely without merits. I might try it again one day, but next time I'll put it on a salad.