If only I had a placenta to blame this on....

As most of you are probably aware, we had a little bit of a shin-dig here in the ole abode last night (more on that coming soon...) In preparation for said event, I had much cooking and baking to do. "Magic cookies", brownies, peppermint mocha balls, key lime snowballs, quesadillas, pancakes, etc, etc, all needed to be cooked up and ready to go ahead of time.

One particular item, though, caused a bit of, uh, drama in our house this past week. For those of you who at an Orange & Nut Bar, perhaps you realized that there were toasted almonds along with a generous drizzle of chocolate on top. Note these two items require an application of heat in order to achieve the desired result.

Well, Thursday night, I crept into the kitchen to prepare these bars. I had made the cookie bottom ahead of time, so all I needed to do was spread the marmalade, sprinkle on some toasted nuts, and drizzle on some chocolate--done! I put a pan on the stove to toast the almonds, and went off to melt my chocolate. For some reason, though, I had the great idea to use a cheap plastic cup for the chocolate, instead of something a bit more heat resistant. Into the microwave it goes!

Back to my almonds. Put those in the pan, they started warming up nicely, but needed a stir. What do I do? I thought I'd practice my chef pan-tossing skills so I wouldn't have to dirty a spoon (and it would actually flip the almonds around, to ensure equal browning.) I actually did alright, save for a couple of strays that fell outta the pan.

Back to the chocolate. Whilst flipping my almonds, I started smelling a bit of smoke, so I opened the microwave to see what was going on. Out comes a huge plume of smoke (stinky smoke, too, not pleasant smelling smoke.... burnt plastic smelling smoke... and chocolate.... it's not a good combination.) Quickly, I slammed the door shut and tried to assess what was going on from the outside. Hmmm... nothing was on fire, so I gave it a minute to, uh, relax?

Next thing I know, smoke starts billowing out from underneath the frying pan on the stove! Apparently, almonds, with their high oil content, will ignite when applied to a heat source in excess of 500 degrees... Luckily, it was only a few slices, which I quickly moved off the heating element (had it been a gas stove, they would have been ashes before I even noticed they were there...) and all was well.

The chocolate, turns out, burned a hole in the cup it was in.... and was an interesting shade of black... Needless to say, that got chucked and I used a glass vessel for the working batch.

All this, in the span of maybe a minute? Two? Yeah... Jeremy just laughed at me.

At least I didn't leave eggs to hard boil on the stove before leaving the house for two hours, SANS placenta. I would have to say that's a completely legitimate "oops" to make when baby's sucking the brains outta ya. :-) Jeremiah musta gotten a little extra, though--he's just discovered his nostrils, and that his fingers fit within them..... yeah....