An Ausmerican Thanksgiving flaws and all

Michele: Thanksgiving was just another day in Australia so we tried to make it special. No turkey dinner here, no cranberry sauce or apple pie. It is hot and humid these days so even the thought of cooking such a meal is unappealing. But we did have a turkey - just not the poultry kind.

It turns out that if you make your own Pavlova you can make it into a shapes other than the circles available at the supermarket. So with the help of a recipe from Mariel, I set out to make a Turkey shaped Pav. It wasn't too hard. Robin drew a turkey shape on paper and then I put the paper on top of some aluminum foil with something soft underneath and traced the shape with a blunt knife. This made a groove in the aluminum foil in the shape of a turkey that I could use as a guide for when I arranged the meringe. For something soft under the aluminum foil I used Robin's homework book - more on that in a bit.

When the Pav was done baking and cooling the kids and I had great fun decorating it to look like a Turkey with food coloring, lollies and strawberries. It was great and tasted just like the ones from Woolies. I took a picture of the awesome turkey-shaped Pavlova but unfortunately, Will was playing with the camera later last night and deleted that photo. He also put the camera into some weird mode that will probably take me months to get out of. Anyways, today I took this photo above of the left-overs. It isn't the same....

Well that wasn't the only thing that went wrong last night with the Pav. Remember I said that I used Robin's homework book as something soft to transfer the turkey shape to the aluminum foil? Well, I forgot to take the book out from under the foil before I baked the Pav - I cooked her homework book. Yes, the Pav had an interesting burnt paper smell as it cooked but since I hadn't made Pav before I didn't recognize this as amiss. You've seen a cookbook but have you seen a cooked book?

Of course Robin's teacher thought this was great fun and told the other teachers and even had Robin tell the story to the whole class for show and tell. There goes any credibility I had built up after I visited school a few weeks ago to talk to Robin's class about planetary geology.