Reading Is Fundamental

So I am making about 40 individual cheesecakes for a party this weekend. I spent ALL day today baking these cheesecakes in individual 4" aluminum pie pans, made sure each batch was perfect and followed the recipe to a T. No mistakes, nothing!!! I was SO proud! All that was left to do was the easy stuff, drizzling some milk chocolate and white chocolate on the tops of 40 cheesecakes!

I thought to myself at (9pm at night) this is easy! If I can make all these cheesecakes without a problem then surely I can melt some chocolate and drizzle it on these delicious desserts!!!

Well it would have been easy if I had remembered the most simple of all rules when it comes to do anything - read the directions.

I don't know if fatigue set in or just a bit of cockiness in thinking I can do this...but I thought I don't need to read directions. But lets just say I turned "Put 6oz of chocolate into a microwave safe dish and microwave on med-high heat for one minute" into "try to create a double boiler out of things you have in your house and end up turning your chocolate into what looks like chocolate crumbles or as we called it - dirt."

Yes, I BUTCHERED my chocolate, semi-sweet morsels b/c I couldn't take the 10 seconds to read the back of the bag where it SPECIFICALLY states how to melt your chocolate. (refer to directions above) Instead I turned what should have literally taken one minute to get beautiful chocolate into 45 minutes of my husband and I trying to figure how to melt the chocolate and why it turned into dirt.

We still don't know what happened but I got smart and read the back of the white chocolate bag and in one minute had a smooth white chocolate ready for drizzling. And instead I had to drizzle Hershey syrup over my cheesecakes. (still good, but wasn't what I wanted b/c syrup doesn't get hard like the morsels. )

So the moral of this story is ALWAYS read the directions no matter how simple you think your task at hand is going to be.



P.S. I will be posting this delicious cheesecake recipe on the food for friends website later this weekend! It is seriously the BEST cheesecake I have had! However, I will be leaving off the drizzle part.