I tried. Really, I did! But it wasn’t meant to be. I even tried baking them to see if I could salvage them! But, well, you can see for yourself.

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This is what happened when I tried to make The Skinny Gourmet’s ^[2] Orange Chocolate Meringues ^[3] for Taste and Create 4 ^[4]. I suppose this does betray my lack of knowledge about baking in general, but when I read “1/2 t” of both of the extracts, I thought she meant 1/2 tablespoon. (Hey, how was I supposed to know that you never use more than a teaspoon of extracts in meringues? – I learned this later when I looked up other meringue recipes online. – But in my defense, she had written “1/8 tsp” for one of the other ingredients in the recipe, so I thought that since she wrote “tsp” for that, then “t” must mean tablespoons? Ah well, my mistake…) Since I tried twice to see if I could salvage it before I realized what I was doing wrong, I didn’t want to waste any more of my parents’ ingredients (I was doing this on New Years Eve at their house) so I gave up and moved on.

I ended up making The Skinny Gourmet’s ^[2] Baked Potato Soup ^[5]. This turned out much better! It’s really easy to make, and turned out really well! One change though… but first some explanation about why I made the change. I don’t drink alcohol. At all. Ever since I (finally!) turned of drinking age, I have tried several different types of alcoholic drinks, and hated every one of them. What can I say, I’m picky! Anyways, the recipe called for 1 cup of ale-style beer (after cooking, so the alcohol wouldn’t get cooked off?) and I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it, so I divided the soup in half and only put half a cup of beer in half of the soup (and replaced it with half a cup of milk in the other half of the soup). I was right! Both Son and I liked the non-beer soup much better than the soup with the beer (we ended up throwing out the half with the beer)… so if you like the taste of beer, then I’m sure it’s a great addition! But if you don’t, or if you are making this for kids, leave it out (because it doesn’t get cooked after the beer is added in, so the alcohol doesn’t get cooked off.)

For toppings, I used sour cream, crumbled bacon, and green onions. Yummy!

More Pictures

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