Ah, yes. The fateful day dawned. The first thing I did upon coming downstairs was to lift the pan off the Turkish Delight and peek at it. It looked just like it had the day before, but I wasn’t to be daunted. It seemed an unbelievably long time until 2:30. I checked the clock(s) continually. And then, finally, twenty-four hours had passed. I raced into the kitchen, and pulled the pan off. Lifting the blue plastic dish, I gently tilted it toward the light. And . . . the Turkish Delight slid. I stuck my finger in then, and was crestfallen at finding the mixture was of a syrupy substance at best.
Furious, I decided it must have been a faultiness in the pectin. Maybe it needed more calcium to work properly. I would heat it up, and “soak” it again, this time adding the little enclosed packet thingy with the pectin-as-a-stand-in-for-gelatin. So I did. I scraped it all back into a pot and let it heat until it was steamy. Then I added the powders, and stirred it with a whisk—vigorously, this time, to get it as mixed up as I could. And then I scraped it all back into the dish (making another terrible mess—and woe was me, because I am dishes on Wednesdays), and put the pan back over it, and replaced the “Turkish Delight in the making: don’t touch” sign, and marked down the time. I would wait another twenty-four hours.

So Thursday dawns. I wake up, get dressed, and come downstairs. I am half-aware of being thoroughly tired of the phrase “Turkish Delight” by this time. I don’t even want to look at it—I’m too afraid it’ll be just as syrupy as before. I decide to wait till 3:30 to even open it. Siobhan looks in sometime in the early afternoon, and says it looks promising. I hope she’s right. Time creeps along, and 3:30 hits.
And my poor, precious, wicked, exasperating Turkish Delight is just as liquidy as ever. Well, ok. This time it graduated from syrup to crystallizing honey. It better have! I had a whole box of pectin in it—not to mention all that help-the-pectin-gel stuff!!
Oh, dear. I’m afraid I just don’t have any luck when it comes to adventurous experiments. For Biology, earlier this year, I had to put a spoonful of jelly, a slice of bread, and a piece of apple in a container and set it out somewhere to mold. I put it in our basement, because we’d been having terrible molding problems—molding doors, molding carpet, molding books, molding ceilings, molding baby dolls. And guess what? Not a molecule of mold. I finally got rid of the poor failure experiment yesterday; the apple dried out and stuck to the bottom of the Tupperware container, the bread went hard as a rock, and the jelly turned into a tough-chewy-candy-like substance. *sigh* Woe is me.

But I will make Turkish Delight one day. And it will work. One day. Just you wait and see.