Yesterday night. That was the night. Well you see, my husband, J had invited his colleagues over for a pizza party this afternoon. Pizza party meaning that he was going to make pizzas, from scratch, for them. I was tasked to prepare dessert. After giving it some thought, I decided to make Maple Pecan Tart. It’s almost Christmas, and pecans make me feel christmasy. It wouldn’t be tough anyway, just prepare the tough, throw it into the fridge and bake the tart shell the next morning. How difficult could that be?

Not difficult, if nothing went wrong. Well, to start things off, the food processor was not quite cooperative. After just a couple of pulses, its motor decided to stop running. “A safety feature to prevent overheating”, the Cusinart food processor manual reads. Great. So I had to wait for 10 minutes before it started working again. I added the ice cold water and proceeded to pulse and realised that once again, the motor had stopped running. After maybe 5 pulses? I always knew pulsing the dough heats up the motor more than just typical blending but after 5 pulses? And I was only making dough for ONE tart shell! So it was 10 minutes waiting time once again. For those who are wondering if I should get a new food processor, my food processor is barely a year old.

After twiddling my thumbs for 10 minutes, I proceeded to finish pulsing the dough, making sure that there were enough butter bits so that the tart would be perfectly flaky. I tried to remove the bowl from the processor and realised it was stuck and so I had to enlist the help of my strong husband. He too couldn’t easily remove it, and while trying to remove it, hit the power on button on the food processor and off the food processor went, blending my dough into a smooth paste. I gave a yelp before he turned it off. And there it was, my nice flaky dough with butter bits was not a smooth smooth paste, with no butter bits to be seen at all. I took a look at the clock and decided that I was NOT going to redo the tart dough. We would just see how forgiving this dough is, today.

And so that was my most unfortunate experience with preparing tart dough. The next time, I would be less lazy and do it by hand.

Could things get any worse? Well yes. J had intended to prepare the pizza dough yesterday night and allow it to proof overnight in the fridge. Unfortunately (once again), the pump in the fish tank decided not to work. We have three totally adorable puffer fishes (actually I only think that two of them are adorable) and they are housed in their own tanks, lest they kill each other. The pump in the middle stopped functioning and the poor fish was in slight distress. J attempted to fix the pump, only to realise that a small part of the pump had broken into two. Figuring that out took him almost the whole night and he couldn’t finish the pizza dough, obviously. And the fish was still in distress.

At 12 am, I conked out and J followed suit, not before throwing an air stone into the distressed puffer’s tank. Hopefully nothing else will go wrong at the pizza party today.