But all the same, Valentine’s Day rocks around every year on February 14th like it or not. This year I decided to rebel and not go have dinner somewhere nice and eat in at home. I thought all the same I would try and do something a little spesh so I decided to have a go at some rice paper rolls. I guess I was excessively comforted by the words on the packet – versatile, quick and easy to prepare. I would like to let anyone know that Trident is lying about most of that unless you have some kind of Chinese cooking guru gene or perhaps some savvy Nigella know how. Unfortunately I got left out of the cooking gene pool so in my experience, they are time consuming and fiddly. Regardless, they are incredibly yummy if you can get past the fact that they look like a stir fry wrapped in plastic.

Vietnamese Roll Fail!

What I love about Borders isn’t so much that they have a Gloria Jeans coffee shop in there (personally I’m partial to Zarraffas but any port in a storm) but that no matter what the subject title, they invariably have a book for it. And not just one book either, generally several – unless it’s a really obscure title like Gourmet Cooking for Dummies. I’m assuming the reason why there is only one copy of that title at Mt Gravatt is because people who wish to be gourmet cooks generally have other ways of going about it – like a cooking class or they have “the way” about them. They don’t really need a book to tell them how to cut an orange in a fancy pattern, they just know. It’s genetic….or at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Speaking about cooking, I don’t know why it was that I ended up in Borders looking in the cook book section. I had a voucher for a full price book 30% off so you would think I would get something somewhat entertaining like a Peter Moore travel lit book or maybe something funny by Jeremy Clarkson. For some reason I glossed past the travel lit section and even the funny section and ended up with cooking. The Mt Gravatt store is only small (in comparison to the city), so there’s only about 12 shelves packed full of books all related to recipes, preparing food or the cooks themselves like Gordon Ramsay. I suspected it would start with “now if you can’t F’ing bother F’ing doing it right, then put the book down and F right off”. So I took the advice I imagined would come from it and didn’t even pick it up.

I did pick up Rachael Guy’s book in the picture below to look at it, only because I thought the title was amusing. Guy Food. It’s a pretty small book and the content fairly light on – is that because she assumes that most guys would not want to be able to cook a terrine of duck or some other poncy recipe involving stuffing a squid head. Which brings me to another point – cook books are exactly like mix CDs. Most of the stuff is on it is ok but there will always be at least 3 songs on the CD which you absolutely can’t stand. Cook books are the same, only most of them have entire sections I would turn my nose up at. Anyway, I could cook anything in there without even needing a recipe for it so I put it back on the shelf and ended up with a book called Easy Comfort Food. One day I may even open it again to cook something from it.

Does that mean they have to cook it too?

So in case I pike on the Phoney 365, I decided to set myself another weekly challenge for the year. I touched on my concept of fail cooking last year when I had a go at making some double chocolate chip cookies. I was so inspired by such comments as “kangaroo poop” and being able “to see ugly faces in them”, I’ve decided to make fail cooking a regular feature.

Here’s my latest effort – Anzac fail cookies! At first you might be thinking, well they don’t look anywhere near as horrid as the last lot but I have gotten a little deceptive in my photography. The aerial shot exists purely to make them look like flat, tiny cookies. The actual fact is that they are more like little balls of cookie with a flat base on them. How they managed to be crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside while retaining the shape of a macaroon is completely beyond me.

But if you want to know what makes these cookies extra fail worthy, I’ll share a few trade secrets:

1. Use the oldest coconut you have, it’s even better if you can’t recall ever buying any. Mystery coconut adds something special.
2. Don’t bother measuring the golden syrup, just have a rough guess. If it makes the mixture a little gooey, just add more mystery coconut.
3. Again with the bi-carb of soda, have a guess. It’s extra entertaining when you add too much to the hot melted butter and syrup and it foams up like something from chemistry class. Of course that means you have to get more syrup and butter but hey, what’s the point of cooking if you can’t have a little fun doing it?
4. A lot of people will tell you that you have to make sure your flour is “fresh” or that you should at least have a rough idea what decade you bought it in. The best part about fail cooking is that details like that really don’t matter. You’re still going for the right flavour but if the texture and appearance goes to putty, then so much the better.
5. If you’ve run out of rolled oats in the pantry, don’t despair. You know those little sachets of flavoured minute oats you can get to make porridge at work during your tea break? Those are fantastic backups. Although I would try to stick to flavours that complement each other – like honey buzz and vanilla. Strawberry and apple flavoured probably aren’t that good a mix to use in an Anzac cookie recipe.

Anzac fail cookies, just as yummy as the real thing but twice as borked!

Well this is why I do not bake…..chocolate cookie fail. But then it occurred to me….it need not be all that bad. They still taste good! They just look kind of wrong. So I introduce to you a new form of cooking – fail cooking! Isn’t that great? Now everyone can share their home made cooking because the object is for it to look as bad as possible! I have a feeling I’m going to be very good at this.

Chocolate fail cookies!