Biting off about all that I can chew…

I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for–or, I did, but I didn’t think about it. When my dad said that he wanted to host a holiday Open House for the first time since mom passed away, I was delighted. I immediately decided that I wanted to cook for it, and for days I thought about cool delicacies that I wanted to make for the party. I rarely get to cook for other people, and I love to cook. I decided I wanted to make little mini-quiches, baked in muffin tins, and homemade petits fours. Dad wanted stuffed celery and devilled eggs, so I said I’d make those, too.

Then dad sent out the invitations–to more than 50 people. The Open House is 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. today (Saturday).

I have become a very instinctive cook–I tend to make things up as I go along. One disadvantage of this is that I tend to overestimate how much raw material I’ll need–but that’s easy to do when you not only aren’t working from recipes, but you’re suddenly planning for 50+ people! The other disadvantage, obviously, is that some of your creative improvisations refuse to cooperate, cooking being an art, not a science. Sometimes you get Toll House Cookies, and sometimes…*cough* Anyway, I figured out that I would make two kinds of quiche, ham and swiss cheese, and cheddar with veggies, and that the petits fours (which I had never made before) would be pumpkin cake with praline-pecan filling.

Then we had the big snowstorm on the day that I would have done all my shopping. This week has been very disrupted. I spent Tuesday getting my holiday cards out and Wednesday shoveling snow and otherwise housebound. Thursday, I went shopping, along with the rest of the cabin-fevered world, and that took several hours because I also did some gift shopping. I bought tons of food–way too much, as it turned out. Thursday night, I started cooking.

I baked two more layers of pumpkin cake. I made praline-pecan filling. In both cases, I was practically making up the recipes as I went along–the cake recipe I adapted, but it’s a pretty radical adaptation from the original (a carrot cake recipe that I’ve done all kinds of variations on). The pecan-praline filling I literally made up as I went. The cake came out fabulously well. The filling came out fabulously well. The cake went together beautifully.

Then my luck ran out. I had planned to make petits fours glaces with a poured icing, and I screwed up the icing. It was too wet and wouldn’t dry, and the first batch of petits fours was all gloppy. I ended up having to throw some out. But I still had a lot left, because two cakes, cut into 1-inch square petits fours, make a ton of petits fours, and they’re very rich without any icing at all. The cake is dense and moist and the praline filling…well, it’s butter, ground pecans, brown sugar and confectioners’ sugar, you do the math! So the petits fours got a sudden re-design and ended up with a dusting of powdered sugar and a squiggle of colored icing gel (red, green or gold) on their tops.

Then I did the quiches, which started with homemade butter pastry. I was up until almost 5:00 a.m. Thursday night rolling out pastry and fitting it into muffin tins. I had a variety of pans totalling 38 cups, and I wanted to fill them all so I could start baking quiches as soon as I got up. I also cleaned, cooked, drained and wrung out the spinach, and cooked the ham. I missed sunset attunement, I didn’t even do my workout. All I did was cook, and cook, and cook, and cuss out the petits fours because I could see that the icing was a big fat fail.

Yesterday, I made up the quiche filling, tucked it into the pastry shells, poured in the egg/milk mixture, baked them, removed the quiches from the cups and put them into paper baking cups, washed the muffin tins, re-lined them with pastry until I was out of pastry, and baked more quiches. They ended up being ham, swiss and onion, and spinach, mushroom, onion and cheddar, except for a few that are just mushroom, onion and cheddar because I ran out of spinach. When all of those were finally done, I got out the cake and finished the petits fours, which also got tucked into little paper cups before I dusted on the powdered sugar. Then I hard-boiled four dozen eggs. I almost missed my workout again, but I just couldn’t stand it, and got my cycling done late. Finally, I made the stuffed celery, piping seasoned “light” cream cheese into celery stalks with a pastry bag. I’ll make the devilled eggs before I leave for my dad’s house today, you can’t really do those ahead of time.

I’m worn out! I’ve cooked (and washed dishes–every pot and bowl I own, at least twice, it feels like) for three straight days for this party! Dad has apparently decorated the house to within an inch of its life, and I sure hope we get a good turn-out. It should be quite a time. You know what would make me happiest of all? The end of the party and no leftovers! 🙂 We’ll see…!

I was just working too hard–usually multi-tasking–to stop and take pictures, and once everything was done, I was getting it packed. But here’s a picture of the cake in progress. It’s three layers of cake and two layers of filling.