This, was my quarantine…

The story behind how the Corona Cooking Challenge began

I arrive at my mom’s house after coming from my dad’s. I’m starving. The best option is to make myself something. The thing that catches my eyes most in my kitchen is the cheese and bread. I start thinking about cheese toasties and then I think if I got the rolling pin out I could flatten the bread and reinvent the cheese toastie into a roll-up.

It’s about 30 minutes later and I have made it. It tastes just like I wanted. My whole family starts eating dinner and now the usual thing here is that we would talk to my uncle. He is in New Zealand, so my mom calls him up and the first thing we talk about is, of course, the cheese roll-up things. A few minutes pass by and we mention a tv show we’ve been watching called Nailed It.

The way the tv show goes is unprofessional bakers have to do a bake-off in a rushed time limit. They have to make a unicorn ice cream cake or a similar thing that would take much more than the time limit given to the contestants. Hearing this story, my uncle thinks for a bit and tells us about his idea. He thinks my little brother, my kiwi cousin’s and me should do a Nailed It bake-off thing for quarantine.

Uncle Steve has his own reasons for wanting to do this with his nephews. He knows he won’t be in our lives for too long so he is always joking that he is doing this for when we are older and dating or living away from home. You can tell he wants to teach us how to cook because this is his last chance to be able to do things like this with us. This also makes us cousins want to try our hardest. We don’t just want to win we want to make something kickass to impress our uncle who used to work in super fancy restaurants.

Over here, you can see the stuff Uncle Steve got us to make each weekend we were at my mom’s. And over here I go into detail on the challenge where I did my best.

The idea of this challenge was kind of random. But for hours every weekend, I made stuff I had never heard of and got into working really hard on them. Decades from now when I look back at COVID-19 I will remember baking weird stuff with my brother, my cousins and my mom for my Uncle.