The Chocolatey Catastrophe

I was around ten or eleven years old when I was given the privilege of making pudding for our family. Every week I would whip up a batch of the chocolatey snack and then place it in the refrigerator to be eaten on as pleased. So, nothing was unusual when I started tossing ingredients into the blender.

The whirring sound of the food processor died down as I reviewed the recipe. Time to add the one tablespoon of glucomannan while blending slowly. Glucomannan powder has about ten times the thickening power of cornstarch which has about three times the thickening power of flour. It is powerful! That’s good, but unfortunately, the measuring spoon was too big to fit inside the mouth of the glucomannan container. That’s bad! Luckily, mama always had this handy-dandy conversion chart magnetized onto the refrigerator. That’s good! Sadly, she had recently gotten rid of it. That’s bad. That’s really bad.

I had been recently working with cups and tablespoons, so I had the firm mistaken belief that there were sixteen teaspoons in a tablespoon! So that is what I confidently added to my mixture! Normal procedure complete, I popped off the lid and beheld my creation. At that point I thought the pudding might look a little strange, but it wasn’t until I tried to extract the blender blade that panic started to set in. Gazing down at the blender settings, I saw that the “Smoothie” light was lit up. Turning to Jayla I asked, “If you press the smoothie button, does it turn your stuff into a smoothie?”

She laughed and assured me that it did not. Walking over, she asked, “What did you do?”

With anxiety I asked, “There are sixteen teaspoons in a tablespoon right?”

“No, only three,” she said.

I don’t remember exactly all that went between us after that, but I do remember getting this awful sinking feeling in my chest as the clock ticked on. I remember that slow walk down to the shop as dusk approached, preparing what I would say to Dad and Mom after music lessons were over for the day. I remember being relieved that I wasn’t in trouble as I had thought I was going to be. I remember Dad helping Jayla and me figure up how much we needed to quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple, or however many times the recipe needed doubled, to make it normal again.

Jayla’s laughter, as she struggled to remove the blade from the ninja, rolled a portion of my choco-flubber into a ball and bounced it across the table, still rings in my ears whenever I think of it. The pouring of the sixteen cups of milk, the adding of more sweetener, more cocoa, etc. is even now very clear in my mind. My what a fiasco it was! It was a while before I needed to make another batch of chocolate pudding. To this day, everyone is still laughing at my choco-flubber!

~Halayah