Buon appetito - the dinner party experiment, part 1

I LOVE to eat - and seeing as eating usually involves cooking, when we weren't crafting away or saving my bike from a Dutch bike stealing ring, us two housewives were cooking up a storm here in Nijmegen last week. Rather then just baking a cake, we decided to go all out and do themed dinners.

Night 1 = Italian. We had visions of a candle lit dinner, starting with an Italian aperitif (carefully chosen from the supermarket because of its cute little bottles & red fizzy appearance), beautifully crafted gnocchi and chocolate meringues for dessert...

I've made my own gnocchi plenty of times in the past and it's always been a breeze - it tastes so much better then store bought and if you can mash potatoes, then you can make gnocchi in my opinion.

The potatoes were boiling away...

The dough was being mixed... (and in hindsight, this is when I should have realised something was wrong - I just couldn't get the consistency right but gave up and rolled the little dough balls anyway...)

And by this stage, the balls had kinda melted into little mush - but we were having fun with the dough anyway!

We chose to make the little meringues because lets face it - they look pretty darn cute on that website. Ours however, didn't so much resemble acorns - more something you'd find in a dog park...

We beat the egg whites to that beautiful fluffy marshmallow stage...

Folded in the cocoa, maizena and various other ingredients to give it that yummy chocolatey taste...

And piped away onto a baking tray...

We forgot to take any photos of the finished product (2 of these sandwiched together with some melted chocolate) but lets just say, the recipe was misleading... Despite supposedly making 60 little meringues halves, we only ended up with this tray????

So, Italian night - the verdict... Never again are we drinking Camparisoda (just cos something is red and fizzy doesn't mean it's sweet and tasty), the gnocchi was pretty tasty in its cheesy basil sauce, despite it's deformed shapes, and the meringues weren't quite as expected, but still chocolately and yummy - so how wrong can you go...

We may still need to perfect our housewifey dinner party skills - but I think that's just a perfect excuse for some more feasts to be cooked when we next meet again - this time, in not-so-flatland...