It was a few months ago when I stumbled onto a video about making churros and it gave me an inspiration because it seemed really simple. So off I went to the web to search among different recipes to get an idea of what is needed. And I found one! However it mentioned that this is an advanced recipe and other websites also mentioned that whole “advanced” word. With the fact that I have never made anything from scratch, nor fried anything, and this is a so called “advanced” recipe, I still believed that it couldn’t be that hard. I mean, all it called for was flour and eggs, some butter and water, and some oil for frying. You put water and butter in a pan with a little salt and bring to a boil and add all the flour and eggs and turn the temperature down and stir a little bit and put that batter into a piping bag and pipe it into the oil. Seems easy right?

Well, yeah, it seems really easy. During winter break, my friend and girlfriend came over and we set off to the kitchen. And it started off a bit…well, eh. I mean we made the batter, but during that there was the two of them over a pot saying everything is wrong, and then there is me saying it looks like the video, and then everything started happening fast. The eggs needed to be stirred in while still breaking the other eggs, so it’s me breaking the eggs while stirring and my girlfriend taking the shells. All of that and my friend just standing back saying it’s all wrong and throwing his hands in the air. Then it calmed down, the batter was done, and the oil was heating up. My girlfriend had to leave and it was just me and my friend who also had no cooking experience and me with little experience.

We were ready, like really ready.  We didn’t have a temperature gauge so we just assumed the oil was ready, but then it started smoking, and then it started smoking more. So then I turned on the overhead fan and that didn’t work, and when I turned around the house was full of smoke.  I panicked, my friend panicked, and when I removed the oil from the burner really fast, it splashed on the burner and a cloud of smoke flew up and it smelled horrible. So in my head, the smart thing to do was immediately put the pan back on the burner and turn the burner off.  We found  a temperature gauge and surprisingly we ended up with oil almost at 600 degrees when it should’ve been at 350. After all of this we opened all of the windows and doors and put fans out and cleaned up and threw everything into a plastic bag.

But we weren’t going to be discouraged. Twenty minutes later we filled out the piping bag with the dough and turned on the burner to the lowest setting and spent 30 minutes slowly raising the temperature to 350 so there wasn’t another incident. And then, we started.

This time we were calm and collected. I piped the dough into the oil and my friend cut the dough when the length was good and they cooked for a couple minutes. They looked amazing. My friend went to roll them in cinnamon and sugar while I cooked another batch and we ended up with two dozen.

It ended up being a very good day. We may have almost set the house on fire, but in the end it was worth it. The sweet taste of success was definitely worth it.