superheated chocolate disaster

Last night I experienced my first microwave misadventure; at least the first that I can remember.

You see, our [cream cheese] frosting supply from the chai spice cupcakes I made a while ago ran out, and-- much like the dilemma of the hot dogs (ten to a pack) and buns (eight to a pack)-- I had made a batch of chocolate cupcakes to use up the extra frosting from the previous cupcakes. I decided to make chocolate frosting this time, something light and airy. In order to try something really different, I got out the cookbook most likely to have a good frosting recipe: Sinfully Vegan. "Whipped chocolate frosting" really seemed to fit the bill.

This is the point in the story where I give the disclaimer that I don't often use cookbooks. I have a difficult time following recipes. Usually I don't gather the ingredients first, or even check to make sure I have everything (which happened with the cupcakes this frosting was for. I was out of sugar. And then I just assumed they needed baking powder, as that's what most vegan baking recipes call for, but it was baking soda... and by the time I realized that, since I only ever write down the barest bones of a recipe and it just read "1t bs," it was impossible to remove the baking powder from the flour and cocoa in the mixing bowl. Then the whole thing sat in the fridge for a few days til I bought sugar. At any rate, back to the frosting saga...). I try to read all of the directions first, now, but what can I say. I'm really not good at following any directions.

So I had dumped all of the ingredients into the blender, except for the two cups of chocolate chips which were to be melted in the microwave. With the power at 50%, I nuked for one minute, checked for melting, another minute, checked, another minute... until they had been in there for five minutes. That seemed a tad long for something as meltable as chocolate, but the chips were a little old, so who knows. Finally, I microwaved it for a minute at full power.

When I opened the door, there was smoke coming from deep within the chocolate mass. I poked it with a spoon, and the smoke increased. I poked around more, to try to smother the... superheated mass. In the center of the still-not-melted cup of chocolate chips, hard black chunks sizzled and spewed. I ran cold water into the pyrex cup, thinking that would cool it down and put out any possible fiery-type stuff. Smoke-filled bubbles buzzed angrily to the surface. For a while I continued to poke, hoping to dampen more of the smoldering, superheated, black, crunchy mess.

It didn't work. I added more water, and left the whole thing in the sink, thinking that a good soak would loosen it up to be cleaned in the morning. In the meantime, I went on to make the frosting with a fresh batch of microwave-melted chocolate chips, this time stirred every thirty seconds. The frosting came out more like ganache. Oh well.

The next morning, the chocolate-microwave disaster had somehow subsumed the water into itself. Again, I left it and went about my morning. Imagine how impressed I was, then, when Erik set to washing dishes and took the time to scrape out the pyrex cup and clean the whole thing up. My hero! I made sure that the cupcake for his lunch had extra ganache on it.