An Eton Mess of a Day!

November 23rd

After my maths class today, I went to The Staggs to play a game of pool with Sarah and pay for my upcoming trip with the hillwalking club; though when we got there it turned out both of the pool tables were out of order. Rotten luck! So we decided to play a game of foosball (or I guess they call it here “table football”) instead. Well that didn’t go so smoothly! We struggled to figure out how to put 50 pence into the foosball table. I was literally on my knee trying to see the coin slots better wondering how come I couldn’t get our coins to go in. Sarah and I ended up asking some guys at the table beside us how to work that contraption and it turned out that it only accepted 50 pence pieces, rather than our one 20 pence and 3 ten pence. Luckily one of the guys had a 50 p on him, though we still struggled, so the guy ended up helping us again. Finally, 9 orange ping pong size balls appeared in the black track that they had set up. Sadly I was trying to work out how to get the ball out so we could play… and the guy (who probably thought we were hopeless by this point) showed us that it stays in the track, we just drag it up and there is a hole to get it on the table. It was a bit of a “d’oh!” moment for me. I guess I could use the excuse that I never had to pay to play foosball before- which after spending about 10 minutes trying to figure out ‘how’ we could play one game, I am sure anyone watching could tell- but it was still pretty pathetic. 

Once our 9 balls were up, we were still in the midst of our game but decided to forgo going through the embarrassing process of figuring out how to pay to keep the game going. 

Around 3pm, I went to Hannah’s to make pavlova for the pudding social that we were going to later that day. Once we got the three egg whites separated and ready to beat into a meringue, we realized too late that the electric beater was broken, and Hannah didn’t have a whisk at her apartment. So we ended up trying to whisk the egg whites by hand with the ‘whisks’ from the egg beaters. Roughly 40 minutes later of alternating shifts to whisk the egg whites, we had our mixture almost to a meringue viscosity, but it became a little runny once we added the sugar.  Our tired arms decided that it was close enough, so we put it on the baking sheet as one giant pancake like blob, and put it in the oven for about an hour. Both of us quickly decided that it was going to be an Eton Mess rather than a pavlova. It sounded like there was going to be a dessert competition at the pudding social, and from the state that it was in we agreed that ours had no chance in winning and just hoped it was at least edible. 

On my walk back to Montefiore, I saw a group of people lighting those paper lantern floats which was pretty magical as they drifted into the night. 

Around 7pm, I rejoined Hannah and found that she managed to borrow a proper whisk from a friend. Huzzah!!! It was quite amazing at how quickly we were able to whip whipping cream with a proper whisk- let’s say roughly 3 minutes vs. the 40 minutes we spent with the egg whites. 

After that we added the berries, and I got to have some artistic creativity with the extra strawberries by making a swirl on top and for the finishing touch, Hannah added a sprig of red currents in the middle. Our dessert was finally ready and just in time too as we got in the car to head over to the pudding party. 

Arriving at the party, we were one of the first to arrive; putting our dessert on the table. Soon afterwards the room became quite full where we ran out of seats, and the dessert table was completely covered in delicious concoctions. 

 

After a few hours, we were all experiencing a bit of a sugar coma. During the evening, we also had a casted our votes on the desserts for “Most Original”, “Best Appearance”, and “Best Tasting”. It was so hard to vote on the most original and best tasting categories since so many of the desserts were amazing. In the end of the evening, the votes were in and tallied up. At least everyone had received at least one vote from someone else on their dessert. Jenny and Josh announced the winners: for “Most Original” the winner was Tim, who had made a Guinness chocolate cake with a cream cheese frosting/icing. For “Best Appearance” the winner was Tristan, who had made a chocolate, ginger cake with raspberries on top. Finally for “Best Tasting” the winner was Hannah and me?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!! WHAT?! It was quite a shock to us, but our dessert won!!!!!!! As a reward the winners were given wooden spoons. I have to say our dessert was definitely an underdog, at least to me. 

It has been quite a pleasant day.

Tristan's scrumptious ginger chocolate raspberry cake!

Our dessert by the end of the night!

Hannah and me with our proof of a dessert done well