I need to have a go at whipping something.

 

I don't really do cream so I'm somewhat unfamiliar with stiff peaks.

 

The runny stuff, the single cream is OK up to a point, but double whisked, fluffed-up cream isn't my number one choice. This is perhaps the reason why I have few whisks at my disposal at home.  Apart from a flick around a gravy, I generally have no need for the things.

Meringue is another mystery to me.  Pavlova is a big hit in our usually male dominated house, so I can't even say it's a girly thing.  I have tried it, but it's a deeply disappointing experience.  You bite into it only to find there's nothing actually in your mouth except a blast of something that was probably very sweet.  It just seems a bit pointless. 

In fact, if I'm honest, puds don't really cut it for me at all.  I'd have a cheese board or just an ice cream if an ice cream should be available. Any flavour. Oh and fruit salad.  I make an excuse for chocolate though.  My passion for chocolate is well-documented in these pages.

Pavlova? I don't really get it.

Yet some people visibly melt at the very mention of meringue.  I've noticed it prompts the occaisional "Oooh...ooooh" with a curious accompanying satisfied or expectant facial expression from those of a female persuasion which suggests I am totally out of my depth when it comes to egg white-based confections.  

I might be wrong here but they so often appear to be the same ladies that go all peculiar when it comes to Baileys, which is another off my radar item. It tastes, to me, like the catch-all medicine that I used get rammed down me as kid that was a cure-all for whatever was ailing me at the time from chicken pox to runny nose.


But of course, it contains cream.  So maybe that's it. Or maybe it's the emulsifier containing refined vegetable-oil which stops the cream and whiskey splitting that doesn't work for me, taste-wise. Whiskey or whisky, on the other hand are big hits with me. We've had an affair for many years.

Double cream, double the fun? Pampered Chef double balloon whisk time.

Anyway.  I'm getting off the point. I would like to get into the whole whisking thing because I think there could be something quite satisfying about it and it's prompted by a couple of events. 

One squirt or two..?

One: I read some - no, quite a lot of  - sniggering from women clearly up to speed with the whole 50 Shades of Grey thing and there were whisk references going on.  It's a not a bedside reading item for me so I can only wonder what caused such sniggers or whether I had totally confused the messages. Maybe it was cream, rather than whisk thing...anyway.

And two: the Pampered Chef double balloon whisk I saw demonstrated a bit back.  It's a strange looking creature, if I'm honest.  It looks like somone started making what a whisk should look like and got a bit confused having too many whisk-type metal bits, mid way. 

Anyway the end result is maximum aeration. Loads of air after a moderate beating. It certainly made short work of the cream I looked at. After giving it a bit of a seeing-to, the female demonstrator had peaks all over the place.  And in record time.

I want to join in the fun.

Taken us a while to get there; we've had a passion for sweetened creamy stuff since the sixteenth century. Maybe my not liking frothy cream thing was also driven by the 'squirty' cream that was a pudding staple in my childhood. Press too hard, one squirt and it was all over the damned place. And it tasted of what, exactly?

I could give a batter a batter. It's a possibility. But maybe I need to get over this whole whipped aversion, get a double balloon whisk, give it a go and see if I can peak.

I might even like it.

• If you have any thoughts and theories, please feel free to comment. And repost on facebook and twitter as you so please. You can contact me on mikegetscooking on facebook or at mikegetscooking@gmail.com.