Forty Lashes With a Limp Strand of Angelhair Pasta

I showed up for Thanksgiving dinner at our friends' house bearing a tiramisu with beer in it. As if that weren’t unorthodox enough, it also had an unknown number of strands of rubbery uncooked angelhair pasta embedded in it. The beer was intentional; the spaghetti was not.

Here’s how it got in there. I made the beeramisu last night and it sort of overflowed the dish it was in so that I couldn’t cover it with the dish's own lid without smooshing it and making a cocoa-y mess. Recalling an old trick of my mom’s, I decided that I’d stick the beeramisu full of toothpicks and cover it with a little Saran Wrap tent.

Problem: We didn’t have any toothpicks. “What do we have that is like toothpicks?” I thought to myself. “Eureka! Spaghetti!” I checked the cupboard, only slightly deflated by the fact that all we had was angelhair. A little flimsier than I would have liked, but it would still work. I broke the pasta up into toothpick lengths, stuck them here, there, and everywhere in the beeramisu and covered the whole shebang with Saran. Then I put it into the fridge to chill. I congratulated myself heartily and even imagined how I might later share this ingenious household tip with the blogosphere!

Flash forward to this afternoon. I took the beeramisu out of the fridge only to discover that—of course—the pasta had absorbed all sorts of moisture from the beer (and the coffee, whipped cream, and mascarpone cheese) and was suffering from a bad case of brewer’s droop. I extracted what I could of the flaccid strands of pasta, but portions of them remained permanently lodged in the depths of the beeramisu like glutinous shrapnel.

Today’s Random NaBloPoMo blog: Peevish Pen