Dr. Oetker Microwave Mug Cakes Baked in the Oven

Over Christmas my sister gave me two Dr. Oetker Mug Cakes to be made in the microwave that I don't own. Since then, they  have been sitting on my shelf, taunting me. It's really frustrating to be so close to a mug cake, and yet so far. I thought about taking them to work and using the microwave there, but it seemed so embarrassing. What if someone asked me what I was doing? I would have to say that I was making a mug cake in the microwave. I couldn't go through with it. Tonight I finally broke and decided to try them in the oven.

I guess it ultimately went fine. I'm not sure what I expected from these mug cakes. They definitely weren't the best cakes I've ever had, and as far as easy-bake cakes go, I would have preferred a Betty Crocker or Sarah Lee cake in a big pan because those cakes are actually delicious. The best parts are the burnt corners. The mug cakes definitely took a lot longer to bake than they would have if I had made them in the microwave: they're advertised as taking only 1.05minutes in the microwave, but took over 25minutes in the oven. My sister suggested I use the oven for another purpose at the same time, but I didn't. I just put two tiny little Pyrex dishes, each with half of one mug cake in them, in the oven for over 25minutes.

I have nothing else to say about this experiment. I was expecting something to go terribly wrong, like that the little glass dishes would break. But nothing went wrong. The cakes came out tasting, presumably, as they are supposed to taste (which is subpar). Here are some photos of the process:

Everything you need to make your very own 1 minute mug cake,
minus the microwave and plus 25 minutes.

Here are these little cakes, ready to go into the oven. I kind of wish I had
stopped here and just drank the batter because it actually tasted better
than the finished cakes.

I wanted to take a picture of how, after 20 minutes, the cake was still liquid,
but I really struggle with holding the camera steady. The end result
might be ... art?

This doesn't look very appetizing, but it looks just as appetizing as the
finished product ultimately was.

Anyway, there you have it. Would I make this again? Yes, because I still have one more box to get through. I'm going to make it tomorrow. I am going to try it as a single cake baked in a slightly larger Pryex container. We'll see how it goes.

Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda (2)

I am still so enraged about this experience.

Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda

Tonight M and I went out for dinner together. We settled on the Hacienda branch of the burgeoning "Playa Cabana" franchise because it seemed cool and hip. And also Mexican, which is what M was looking for. We had settled on this place specifically because they serve nachos, whereas most other Mexican restaurants seem to make their nachos using that disgusting liquid cheese that comes out of a pump.

Things started out well enough. We ordered a bucket of beer. And then I noticed a little addendum to the menu saying that they were not willing to make substitutions except in the case of allergies, when possible. I kindly asked the waitress that though I understood they had this policy, would it be possible to order nachos totally plain, just with cheese. (And let me just state that while I understand that making substitutions and exceptions in a kitchen is likely really annoying, I feel like when your order is changed to be the most simple version of that dish, it really should not be a problem.) The waitress said she didn't think it would be a problem but that she would have to double check with the kitchen. Meanwhile, M ordered a chorizo burrito.

The waitress came back and said it wouldn't be a problem. And I said "great," because I was really looking forward to those nachos. A quick note about the nachos: they were listed under the "appetizer" section of the menu, which is pretty common. I'm not sure I have ever seen nachos listed elsewhere. They are generally considered a food to be shared, and they also usually come in heaping portions. I ordered these nachos with the expectation that I would eat approximately half of them and take the other half home to eat tomorrow. One thing I've learned this year is that re-heating nachos in the oven is delicious. The nachos were also $14, which, again, is a pretty standard price for nachos. I saw no reason to consult further with the waitress about the size of the nachos, because every other waitress' response to this question in every other restaurant is something along the lines of how enormous the portion is.

And then the nachos arrived. And first of all, they arrived approximately five minutes before M's burrito, which is always really frustrating. But more frustrating still is that "nachos" consisted of eight chips. EIGHT CHIPS. For $14! Eight of them! I was outraged. I still have not calmed down. Meanwhile, in the five minutes that it took me to come to terms with the fact that I just spent $1.75 per chip ($2, if you count the tip), M's enormous burrito arrived.

Words cannot express the kind of outrage I experienced tonight. The "nachos" were designed in two circles, with four chips per circle (so do not think that I am exaggerating the smallness of this portion: there were exactly eight chips). Above you can see a photograph of the final chip. I did not take a picture of the entire ("entire") meal, but we might understand this as an example of metonymy.

In hindsight, I regret leaving any tip at all because I think it was unconscionable of that waitress to not divulge the true nature of these nachos. At first I thought it was not fair to punish the waitress for this pathetic attempt, but frankly, it was. And also, she was a pretty garbage waitress in other respects as well. She brought us the bill before M had finished her food, and then she whisked away the sauces that M was using, also before she finished her food. And then she just left the ATM machine with me and walked away. Like, what am I? Is someone going to pay me for ripping off this "merchant copy"? Give me a break. Also, give me like 100 more chips.

In conclusion, I hope this shitty garbage restaurant crashes and burns, and I hope that whatever monster is behind this atrocity ends up on the streets, unable to make anything work for him/herself. And then I hope that I just so happen to be strolling home from Costco with about twelve double-packs of bulk-sized chips, and he is asking for food. And I will say, "Oh? All of these chips I have with me? I am actually planning to just put them straight in to the garbage. I suppose I can spare eight for you." And then I will stare him straight in the eyes. And then I won't even give him those eight chips unless he forks over $14 first. And even then I won't give him those chips, because whatever chips I manage to buy at Costco will probably taste better than the garbage I endured tonight. I hate this restaurant. I hate it so much. I hate it enough to start a Yelp account and give it a terrible review.

Playa Cabana (Hacienda branch): I hope you are reading this. I hope you can taste my rage as strongly as I wish I was tasting a full serving of nachos. You are the worst. You are the worst place in the world and I hope you cease to exist. If you are in fact reading this, please comment below to ask for my address in order to send me $14 worth of nachos. I will eat them, vomit them up, and then parcel that vomit off into fourteen servings so that I might mail it straight back to you. And because I expect this will not satiate my rage, I will probably do something else that I have not yet thought of.

Food Thoughtz Review: This All-Meat, No-Cheese, Corpse-Pizza

Look. No one is more understanding and respectful of picky eaters than I am, but even I must draw the line somewhere. And that line is drawn at no-cheese pizza. If you don’t like cheese, that’s fine: we all have our burdens to bear. But don’t burden me with the knowledge that there is a cheeseless pizza in our midst, slathered with various meat toppings. Cheese is an essential quality of pizza and you can't get rid of it just because you're afraid of being kidnapped by a Mexican quesadilla cartel.

Do you know that this pizza looks like? Like that disgusting, rare, corpse-flower, rafflesia arnoldii. I hate that flower. It smells like a corpse because it needs to attract beetles and flies in order to pollinate because it is the worst. Why can’t it just attract bees instead with a sweet, flowery smell like every other flower does? No wonder it's so rare. It’s also enormous. It’s the largest flower on earth. It can be 1 metre across and weigh 11kg, so approximately the same size as a pizza.

Disgusting.

Food Thoughtz Review: This New Oh Henry! Big Crunch Cookie Bar That I Got For Free On The Street

I got this new Oh Henry! Big Crunch Cookie Bar for free on the street on Saturday. I almost never accept free things because I am always afraid that a) it will be about Jesus or b) it won't actually be free. I've missed out on free Tide Pods and a Venus razor as a result. The two times previous to this that I thought I would just go for it and get something for free ended up a) being about Jesus and b) followed by a request for a donation. But this time I was pretty certain there were no strings attached because I had actually watched these people unload their wares from the back of a white minivan and they were wearing Oh Henry! clothing and didn't appear to be affiliate either with Jesus or children's summer camps.

So I got this free Oh Henry! Big Crunch Cookie Bar. It is already in stores if anyone is interested. Afterwards I spent some time wandering around assuming that there would be another person on another corner and that I would get another chocolate bar, but I had no such luck.

I didn't eat it right away because I had just bought two medium McDonald's iced coffees, and forgive me, but I just have to mention again how much I love McDonald's: I love it a lot. I love their summer drink specials. I can't believe their medium iced coffees are only $1! This is the season to sell iced coffees! I know that it probably costs McDonald's about 2¢ (and now that we don't have the penny anymore it's probably just 0) to make these, and even at $1 per drink they're still making a tonne off of this, but I don't know. I guess maybe people end up buying more burgers or whatever as a result, but they also have a burger special on during the summer. A McDouble is something like $1.40. It's insanity. Anyway, the point is that I had two iced coffees with me (both of them for myself), and so I immediately forgot about this Oh Henry! until three days later.

And now it's three days later and I just ate it. It looked like this:

It was totally fine. In a way I'm glad I didn't spend any money on this, but it's also something that I can see myself spending money on. I probably wouldn't buy this chocolate bar if there was something better on offer, like a Crunchie or a cheap Milka, but there have been a lot of times when I've wanted a chocolate bar, but the selection is so poor that the only thing that appeals to me is the Twix, and this new Oh Henry! is actually a lot like a combination of an old Oh Henry! and a Twix bar. 

It's actually even kind of like a Twix in that it comes in two pieces. Part of me suspects that this is Oh Henry's appeal to our health. Like that by splitting up the chocolate bar they're making it more obvious that this is not meant to be consumed all at once or perhaps we should consider sharing it with a friend or significant other. Obviously I ate both pieces at once. As you can see in the picture above, they're not as nice looking as a Twix bar.

In summation, as far as generic chocolate bars go, this one was pretty good but not the best. If you see someone handing them out for free on the street, you should definitely try to get one. Even if you just see one in a convenience store and you really want a chocolate bar, but none of them are really jumping out at you, you might want to try this one. Nothing about it will surprise you, but you probably will not be disappointed with your decision. I definitely wasn't disappointed with my decision to get this free Oh Henry! chocolate bar and then forget about it for three days and then eat it.

Also, Oh Henry! chocolate bars have something to do with O. Henry ... right?

Booze Thoughtz: Rosé fröccs with a single frozen strawberry

Hungary has a long list of accomplishments under its leather-satchel-affixed belt: it was a Hungarian who first isolated vitamin C; it was a Hungarian who invented the rubik's cube; and it was a Hungarian who invented the ballpoint pen (fun fact: his name was Bálpont Zoltan, which is where we get the word "ballpoint" from*). But perhaps their greatest achievement of all is fröccs, a delicious wine-soda water hybrid that probably isn't Hungarian in origin at all, but rather Austrian (?), which is why we normally refer to the drink as a spritzer and not a fröccs. Even so, my first encounter with the drink was in Hungary, and even though I also procured a wife from Hungary, by far my greatest takeaway from that proud nation has been fröccs. 

Recently, as I was browsing the fröccs hashtag on instagram, I came across a delicious looking rosé fröccs with a frozen strawberry as an icecube, and I had to have it. A week later I bought one of the cheapest bottles of rosé I could find a proceeded to recreate the drink. The results were anticlimactic. It wasn't bad by any means; just uneventful. A normal food critic might not even bother with a review of such an unimpressive drink, but here we are. The strawberry, despite being a better-than-average organic Ontario strawberry, did nothing to improve the taste of the fröccs. In fact, its addition wasn't even noticeable. The biggest disappointment, though, was that the strawberry actually tasted worse when infused with wine than it did in the first place.

So while the drink wasn't terrible, I definitely wouldn't recommend trying this on your own. Or, I mean, do, but be prepared to be underwhelmed.


*Not true. His name was Bíró József, which is why the English call it a biro.

Food Thoughtz Review: These Nachos

Recently an avid reader and huge fan of Food Thoughtz asked whether I would review the take-out nachos that he was currently eating. I myself did not try the nachos and he was disappointed with them, claiming they were soggy.

When I do write a proper post on nachos, I will have nothing but good things to say because they are delicious and one of my favourite foods.

 After seeing this picture, it should be pretty obvious to any seasoned reader why I didn't eat these nachos. But aside from my personal distaste for leafy greens and whatever this salsa/water-tomato-chunk hybrid that red stuff is, there are a few other reasons why these nachos were a mistake.

1. You can never get nachos as take-out food because they have to be consumed almost immediately upon coming out of the oven. Of course they're best when hot, but most importantly, the cheese has to be freshly melted. There's nothing worse than melted cheese gone cold because it becomes almost like a whole new rubbery substance and it is disgusting. It also looks like these nachos either weren't baked long enough in the oven (some of the cheese should be a golden brown), or worse yet, that they weren't baked in an oven at all but were cooked in a microwave (which I think probably also contributes to the sogginess, although I'm not sure how because I have no idea how a microwave works).

2. If you have to have your nachos with toppings other than plain cheddar cheese (or, ideally Kraft Tex-Mex, although that is so expensive that I can't imagine a person in a financially stable enough position to afford it)--and I would advise that you don't--then you definitely can't get take-out nachos because of course they will only get soggier the longer they sit. That said, it was really irresponsible for the restaurant in question to put such moist tomato/salsa on the chips before baking them. Diced tomatoes that have retained some semblance of form, green onions, green peppers, black olives, jalapeno peppers--fine. I wouldn't eat that, but I can understand why someone would because nachos with those toppings smell friggin' delicious when they come out. But the key is that while all of these toppings have a fairly high water percentage, all of them are solid enough to not totally ruin the chips.

3. Is this salsa? Because this isn't what salsa should look like to me--partly if not mainly because salsa should always be served on the side.

4. These chips look like they might have been oily.

Food Thoughtz Review: Coastal Cheddar

Even though Coastal Cheddar comes from Dorset, I assume the “coastal” refers to the Salish coast where all of those feet washed up on shore, because that’s exactly what this cheese tastes and smells like. This cheese was so disappointing because I love cheddar cheese so much. The sting is always worse when you’re betrayed by those you trusted the most and those you held the most dear. Finishing this block of cheese was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but last night, with a heaping bowl of wagon wheel pasta and spaghetti sauce, I did it—and I have never been more proud.

This actually is one of those mystery-foot shoes.