There are three foods in this world that I just cannot enjoy (aside from cheese, which I am slowly starting to appreciate and even admire). Olives, liver and white chocolate. Don't get me wrong, I haven't just written these foods off because of their smell or a single bad experience, I just cannot for the life of me get myself to enjoy them. The really unfortunate part of this is that I desperately want to enjoy them.
Except for olives. They're just yucky.
My parents both love love love liver. They order it at restaurants and drool over it at home. By rights, I should enjoy liver too. However, instead of salivating at the sight and smell of offal, my esophagus closes right up and I can taste the bile rising in my stomach. Delightful, eh?
Believe me, I've tried to eat liver. After reading in Julie&Julia about the delicate buttery taste of finely prepared chicken livers and seeing carefully put together dishes of liver on menus, I have tried my best to gulp down a forkful. Not successful. Not even a little bit. So even though I want to be adventurous and cook up a pan of chicken livers with something french and fancy sounding to go along side them, I cannot. This makes me sad.
As for white chocolate... I mostly just find this confection to be a frustrating pain in the ass that pops up everywhere I don't want it to. I still use the stuff. I think I'm deluding myself by believing that if I use it enough I will learn to like it. So far I have only learned that white chocolate can be very expensive and never to mix it with cream cheese no matter what the recipe says.
I made a cake this weekend, a prototype cake for a 50th wedding anniversary that I'm baking for in August. The only request was that the cake be lemony. So I got out my books (of which I have way way too many) and searched through them to find the very best sounding lemon cake. Of course it would have to be the cake with the white chocolate lemon buttercream icing that looked the best by far. Couldn't be the one with the regular chocolate buttercream or the one with the fancy italian meringue buttercream... nope, it had to be the one that called for the really expensive and hard to find white chocolate that made up the buttercream.
When the recipe specifically asked for Green & Black's white chocolate with Madagascar vanilla bean seeds I let myself think that maybe my disdain for white chocolate came from the lower quality white chocolate that I just bought from the bins at Superstore. So I (naively) phoned around to find this elusive brand of chocolate that turned out to cost $4.87 per 100grams at the community health foods store. Awesome. Not only did I have to shell out $15.00 on chocolate I wasn't even gonna like, I would have to go to the grocery store that smelled like patchouli, body odor and guilt (for eating pig) (I love pig).
Long story short, the cake was delicious. A buttery almond lemon cake that, while dense, absolutely melted in your mouth with the lemon curd that filled each of the layers. I didn't even mind the tangy white chocolate taste that came from the buttercream. When placed with the cake and the lemon curd, it all balanced out really nicely. But is it worth the super expensive imported chocolate? I gave out samples of the cake to people at work and they seemed to agree that yes, it was worth the money.
But I still don't like the stuff. I can't help it.
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