Suicidal kitchen appliances, alien life forms and why I'm never making cake pops again

This story of suicidal kitchen appliances and alien life forms is sponsored by The Good Guys Kitchens. Please keep reading - I need your help!

As domestic goddesses go, I make a pretty good blogger.

I’m about as domestic as the average not-very-domestic-thing*.

I’m not good at keeping my house neat or organised, and I’m not at all handy.

However, those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I like to cook.

I’m not too shabby at it and I have some nifty kitchen appliances. The kitchen is my favourite room in my house.

I’m one of those annoying people who tweet photos of food they’ve created, like this gorgeous cake:

Or like these wonderful cake pops:

Yes, those are mutant cake pops and they’re in the bin, where they belong.

I tried to melt the poorly-named "melts" in the microwave, as instructed. Suddenly the microwave started making pop, hiss and bang noises, accompanied by a suitably dramatic light show.

Cake pop melts don’t melt on the stove top, even over a bowl of gently boiling water. False advertising if you ask me.

White ones turn to concrete.

Blue ones start to melt, then turn to weird blue glue that won’t attach itself to the outside of a cake pop. No matter how hard you scream, cry or swear.

I couldn’t give those splodgy blotchy blue monstrosities to other people’s children, so in the bin they went. Next to them went the red melts which no doubt would have melted perfectly on the stove top but by that time I was ready to murder the inventor of the cake pop with one of the handy plastic cake pop sticks supplied so helpfully in the kit.

Breathe.

The new, firework-free microwave** is now installed and I’ll be checking the state of mind of all my kitchen appliances regularly to avoid any more suicidal mid-baking-disasters.

It makes me wonder about the rest of my kitchen. We live in a hundred-year-old-house that’s starting to fall apart.

I am as handy as I am domestic, and our house needs some love.***

The last person who renovated our house did it all themselves - clearly without the help of experts like The Good Guys Kitchens. Witness the lack of ventilation under the house. Witness the non-existent ground drainage. Witness the inexorable progress of our house down the hill on which it was built. Oh the humanity.

Thanks to ill-advised DIY renovations, despite keeping my house clean, a new life form is growing on our kitchen bench top. The idiot person who renovated our house used very poor varnish on the wood**** and it’s deteriorating. The varnish is now sticky, so when you pick paper an appliance your hand something up off the bench, nine times out of ten you’ll find it’s fused in place for posterity. Next to the sink, water permeates the wood and has created Fred:

Fred is a new alien life form. Or maybe mould.

Whatever he is, he’s big and ugly and growing each day. At this rate our house will soon be nothing but a large brown stain with a car port.

We need a kitchen renovation. In the meantime does anyone know how to remove Fred? 

Failing that, does anyone speak alien mould?

What renovation disasters have you seen?

* I was thinking maybe a big cat, like a Cheetah. Although apparently they’re actually the biggest of the small cats. I know they’re the only large cat that purrs, because I’ve heard one. Then I realised a Cheetah is fast and I am built for comfort, not speed, and then this whole comparison thing broke down. 

** So far.

*** And new drainage, floorboards, weatherboards, cupboards and bench tops. Love is definitely not all you need.

**** Yes badly-sealed wooden bench tops in a wet area. I don’t. Even. What?