Hey all-- I hope your New Years is warm and sweet (cause I'm freezing my feet off here!) To celebrate New Years, I'm participating in ZA Maxfields Progressive Dinner-- which means you can visit all of the blogs there at the link and see an entire dinner array of blogs!  My blog is not so much a recipe as a way to recover from a failed recipe, but I hope you'll forgive me, because, well, CAKE BALLS!  *dissolves into laughter*  There is a prize at the end if you go to every blog and leave a comment, so sit down, drink something hot and sweet, and enjoy the show :-)


Accidentally Awesome


Okay—so Mate is actually the recipe follower here.  He’s the maker-of-fudge, the soup-party impresario, the, “Hey, let’s make this!” guy.  And as his candy-making expertise has gained weight in the family mythos, he’s become the King of Following the Recipe in the realm of our family and friends.


So this year, high on the successes of the previous year, wherein we sent fudge to half the people I know in the entire world after Christmas, he decided he was going to make cake-pops.


He had PLANS for the cake-pops.  There was going to be sprinkles and decorations, and they were gonna look like Christmas and omigod and gloryhallelujia! They were gonna be frickin’ amazing cake-pops.

Anyone out there who has ever made cake-pops knows where this is going.

It’s like a zillion step process.

First you bake a cake—yay! Then you let it cool, and mix it with frosting—that’s right, like, mix the cake, with the frosting, crumbling it up and mashing it in your fingers like playdough, and then you make balls.  (Heh heh heh… cake balls! Heh heh heh… yeah. I’m twelve.)  Anyway—after you make the balls, you melt the chocolate and dip the sticks in the chocolate and then poke the balls (heh heh heh) and then put them in the freezer to firm up. (Omigod… this doesn’t get any less dirty!) When the balls are firm and good, you dip them in the chocolate, and then set them out to cool.

Now see, some of you are seeing that this looks relatively simple.

Some of you are seeing all the myriad ways this can go heinously wrong.

Let’s start with the cakes, which did not all cook the same.  The dry one didn’t make good balls, and the wet one made balls that stuck together but also fell apart.  Then move on to the chocolate, which claimed to be microwaveable but was not, and Mate tested this with his mouth because the crumbles didn’t look hot since they weren’t melty, and it turned out that crumbled microwaved chocolate was hotter than the temperature of the sun and he had blisters on his lips!  (Poor guy. He’s giving these desserts to my family, you understand, since he works with a bunch of fitness enthusiasts who don’t allow processed sugar to grace their well-shaped, chiseled, manly lips.) 

So he had to melt new chocolate and then try to stick the balls (nope, still laughing) and then, after they chilled, try to bathe them in the new chocolate while they were bound and determined to fall apart.

Yeah.

It was a disaster.

At the end, he had a tray full of broken balls, half covered in chocolate. 

He saw failure. I saw potential comedy with a candy coating.  I also saw processed sugar gold.

“So, just spread it in a cake pan!” I said, all enthusiasm.

“And then what? Broken cake?”

“No! Then pour the chocolate over it, and serve it with a spatula.  You add some whipped cream or ice cream, and girls will be swarming over it like flies!”

“Flies will be swarming over it like flies. It looks awful.”

“Nom-nom-nom-nom…”  Well, I may have said that. I was definitely salivating though, that I do remember.

So, Christmas arrived.  We gave giant packets of three kinds of fudge to everybody, and felt pretty stupid because my family makes Martha Stewart look like a slacker, and I haven’t actually made anything Christmassy since Mate started making fudge.  And the little tray of cake-ball-cake sat unnoticed in the corner.

Until dessert time.

“What’s this?” my nephew said, looking strapping and handsome at twenty years old.  (This is important—until he hit about sixteen, I could swear he’d look like Dopey for his entire life. That he looks “strapping and handsome” means that it really does get better, and all adolescents should have hope!  His ears even stick out less!)

“That’s failed cake-pops, covered in chocolate,” I said.  (Notice that I called them “cake-pops” because I didn’t want him to launch into some silly adolescent snark about “cake-balls”.  That’s my department.)

His mouth made the little “o” shape associated with extreme anticipation. I think he may have drooled a little. 

“Hold on a second,” he told me.  “Let me get the whipped cream.”

So we sat for about fifteen minutes, and he told me about his life while eating probably half of that sinful, decadent failed dessert. I loved that moment—I don’t get enough of them with my sister’s sons, and it was one of the highlights of my Christmas.

“So, the cake-balls didn’t get all eaten,” Mate said glumly.

“Yeah—Nate ate about half the plate.”

“But not everybody loved them. That sort of sucked.”

“I think that depends on how you look at it,” I said philosophically.  “I think the person who ate half the cake really liked them.”

Mate grunted and shook his head.  “Man, I don’t know if I should try those again or not.”

“Go ahead and try them again,” I said.  “You never know what may happen.”

So, that’s not really a recipe for dessert.  But, it could be a recipe for salvaging a failed dessert, right?  Or even just a lesson that if you mix your cake with the frosting and then add chocolate, there is no bad way to do it. 

Or even just a wish to have a happy holiday, and may your New Year be filled with nothing more serious than a failed chocolate cake-ball, with a dipped stick.  (Buahahahahahahahahaha!!!)

Happy New Year!

Chocolate Covered Chocolate

 

By

 

Amy Lane

 

 

Quick! What’s your favorite Steven Spielberg movie?

Jurassic Park? Schindler’s List? Saving Private Ryan? Jaws?

Maybe you’re more a fan of the movies he’s produced.  Maybe you’re heavily into DreamWorks.  Shrek? Penguins of Madagascar? Kung Fu Panda? How to Train Your Dragon?

Quick! Which one was better? Which one was cleaner? Better written? Better acted? Had the most exciting subject matter? Choose your favorite right now!

Bet you can’t.

I know I can’t.

Because they’re so different, right? I mean, Jurassic Park and Jaws had some similarities, but the differences—wow! And even though Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan were both about WWII, they were both such different parts of it, right? I mean, all of those movies have his signature on them, right?  The everyman heroes, the sense that the conflict—be it war, Mother Nature, or human folly—is so great that the everyman is the only one who can survive, but that he’ll never really triumph… the list goes on. Spielberg makes great movies. He makes great movies with a personal stamp. But he makes different movies.  So much of which movie is his “greatest” goes into the perspective of the person viewing the movie—but his artisanship is present in every frame. (Or, if you hate Spielberg’s movies, you can declare it his lack of artisanship and argue about which one is his worst movie—but the same idea applies.)

So…

About craft.

I talk about craft and craftsmanship a lot because so much of what we do is subjective. Some people will loftily tell you that first person storytelling is easy and irritating, and so they will mark it down because really, how good could a story told in first person be? Some people will tell you that angst is cheap and stupid, and that real writing doesn’t rely on such emotional tripe to be meaningful.  Some people will sneer at romantic comedies because they’re vapid and meaningless, and the conflict is so trite.

Honestly, as important as all of that criticism is to the reader, it is nothing that the writer can control.  Trying to predict how two thousand (or twenty thousand or two-hundred thousand) readers are going to react to the same piece of work is like trying to predict whether the cats are going to love the new puppy or hate the new puppy. It all depends on the cats, the puppy, and the day. All a writer can rely on—all a writer can ever rely on—is the thoroughness of his or her own craft.

Writing romance is literally like putting together the box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. Except you know there will be chocolate. And sweet. And possibly some nuts. And sometimes some cherries and sometimes not. And maybe nougat or toffee or caramel. Bugs if you’re kinky, pretzels if you’re lucky, but definitely chocolate.

Definitely the fucking chocolate. Because no matter how many times people say they want different or new or exciting, the fact is, if they have picked up a romance of any sort, they want at least two people working shit out.

Period the end. That’s the fucking chocolate. Every romance has it. It is inescapable.

When people get that box of chocolate, we don’t know if they’re going to like the nuts, the cherries (or lack thereof), the nougat, the toffee, the crickets, the pretzels, or the caramel. All we can control is that the chocolate is the smoothest, most quality chocolate we can possibly produce, that the nuts are fresh, the cherries sufficiently pickled (or lubed), the nougat chewy, the toffee completely cooked, the pretzels crisp, the caramel smooth and the crickets… well,  I’m not sure what you want in a chocolate covered cricket, but someone research that and make sure their crickets are as kinky as kinky gets.

The point is, some people are going to spit that cricket out, and some people are going to think it’s a delicacy. Some morons are going to stick their fingers in the bottoms of all the chocolates and only eat the crèmes. Some people are going to take little nibbles of a few of them and declare the whole box bad, and some people are going to eat the entire two-pound gift box and lick the corners.

All of that--all of that—is completely beyond our control.

I bring this up because I am writing happy.

Yes—I am the queen of angst, and I am writing a happy book. Now, I do this regularly when I write my Christmas stories, and sometimes I get really edgy and write a full-length story like Shiny! Or Gambling Men. The point is, instead of “Angst and Pain, Amy Lane!” the reader is getting happy. No toffee, nougat, caramel, pretzels or crickets—just chocolate.

The reviewer reaction to this is usually surprisingly depressing. “Well, if it was another storyteller, I’d think it was good, but it’s Amy Lane, and she can do better.”  (I shit you not—look under any of my “happy titles” from It’s Not Shakespeare to Going Up! to Shiny! And you will find at least four reviews that say that. Excuse me while I ice my nads. Ouch.)

However, the sales reaction to this is usually very very… cheerful! People love to buy happy. They just feel really guilty about enjoying it. “Well, it was fun, but it was only romantic comedy, so my enjoyment is tainted somehow with the lack of feeling my insides twisted into a double knot and punctured with pins.”  I don’t get it myself—I love myself a good happy—but I’ve learned not to question the things I cannot change.

And I’ve learned not to feel bad about writing happy.

I am putting craftsmanship into every word. I am thinking painstakingly about every character reaction. I am trying hard to fill my story with as many details that give readers a place to grasp the story emotionally as I do with my more serious, pain-laden stories. I don’t want to write the same story every time. Writing The Locker Room or Beneath the Stain 365 days a year would kill me. If I am going to fill my box of chocolates with variety, some of those chocolates are going to have to be garden-variety chocolate crèmes. As long as they’re as carefully crafted as the chocolate covered crickets, I have done my job.

Of course, saying this out loud takes a great deal of cheering from my long-suffering beta reader—it’s hard to buck public opinion with the knowledge that I’m doing my best.

“It’s good,” my beta reader assures. “I love it. If you give this character an incurable disease or kill off a parent, I’ll fly 3,000 miles and smack you.”

“Are you sure? I mean, it’s really a very simple romance, very immediate and character driven. Not… you know. Bells, or Stain, or Keeping Promise Rock. Not… epic.”

Well, my beta reader has put up with a lot, recently. She gets cranky when I say things like this.

“Listen, you.  The last year has been a horror. Dead boyfriends, WWII, Alzheimer’s, mental illness, children leaping from parapets, rape, murder, and HEA after life. I love you, but I love this book too. If you hurt these people, I will hate you. Yes, your reviews might be great if suddenly the fucking dog dies or somebody’s parent takes a turn for the worse, but right now this is rich, simple romance. This is two guys working shit out. Just leave it.”

Uhm, my beta reader writes pretty much exactly what I love to read. If I don’t trust her on matters like this, I am wasting the precious time she needs to be spending writing me some more goddamned happy. 

I need to read the happy—not just hers, I can read anybody’s happy, but she’s the one whose time I’m stealing right now. So I need the happy. And the action. And the violence. It fills something in my soul. It is something I don’t write all the time, and it makes me shiver with impossible hope. If I am going to be using the time she should be using writing, I had better listen to what she has to say.

So I am writing me some happy. Rich, smooth, creamy milk chocolate and nothing else. I will not add bite or crickets or chocolate covered cherries. (Heh heh, cherries!) There may be nuts—it is after all, gay romance—but for the most part?

My box of chocolate needs some of these confections. I shall craft them the best I can, wrap them in the shiniest ruffled foil, make the ribbon on the box big and red and exciting, and I shall ignore the people who think I can do better.

I am writing something I love with all of the skill I possess. There is nothing better than this.