Round two of baking today didn't go quite as planned. Jen didn't realize that she'd have to chill the batter for the peanut butter cookies we're planning to make, and so we didn't have time to make those ones today (got started a wee bit late this morning). Instead, she decided that we'd make the marzipan mice that were also on our baking list. This should have been simple - you roll out little balls of marzipan, dip them in melted chocolate, place them on a tray and then add almond ears, decorative silver balls for eyes and coconut strips for tails.Well...
I got put in charge of melting the chocolate, and I have no idea what I did wrong, but boy did that chocolate not melt the way it was supposed to! We tried turning down the heat, turning up the heat, adding more margarine, adding more chocolate chips, nothing worked. The melted chocolate was grainy and lumpy and just plain gross! But we were running out of time and the marzipan was already rolled, so we tried our very best to dip the balls and get the mice made. We discovered the hard way that if you leave marzipan balls in hot melty chocolate for too long, the marzipan softens and melts too. The chocolate, for its part, did everything in its power to resist properly coating the balls. Let's just say that by the end of the whole fiasco, half the chocolate was burned to the bottom of the pot and I've dubbed the cookies "franken-mice". Ah well! Some of them are cute.
The reason for the rush at the end of the baking was that we'd planned to go and visit the Melbourne Zoo today. Irene's trying to fit in going to all the places around the city that she hasn't seen yet, since she leaves us on Saturday. We finally headed off for the zoo around 1pm, knowing that it closes at 5 - hoping that we'd have time to see it all. The zoo turned out to be quite deceptive in size - on the map it's not all that big, and the number of exhibits seemed fairly small compared to the Toronto zoo. But we wandered around it all afternoon and we didn't see everything - I might actually have to go back!
For the first couple of hours, to be honest, we weren't all that impressed. Many of the enclosures we passed were fairly small and full of thick vegetation - I would say that we only saw about half the animals! Rather disappointing when we paid almost $20 each to get in. I kept reminding myself that we do have a world-class zoo in Toronto, and that there won't be many zoos around that can compare with it. But our luck changed during the second part of the afternoon. First we walked through an excellent display of tree-top monkeys. This was essentially an elevated walkway with 'blinds' set up all along its length, looking into different enclosures - at tree-top level, where the monkeys actually hang out. This area was really well done... each enclosure was screened from those around around it by bamboo thickets, and being up high meant that we were seeing the habitats from the same level as the animals.
The best part of the zoo, though, was the elephant rainforest. I swear it felt like we had been suddenly transported to Indonesia. We walked through a section of rainforest jungle and emerged in... wait for it... an Indonesian farmers field! Complete with village huts and a broken down rickshaw. All the signage in this part of the zoo was written in Indonesian, with English translations underneath. It was excellent. There was also an excellent display in this part of the zoo on orangutans. Their enclosure was really cool, with lots of fun poles etc. to swing on. I guess that's one advantage that subtropical places like Melbourne have over Toronto - the animals can be out on exhibit pretty much all year round because the weather is so much warmer - so some of the exhibits, like the orangutan's, was pretty huge.
By this time it was past 4 and we still hadn't seen any of the Australian animal section - and Jen really, really wanted to see a wombat. So we double-timed it to the outback display. Just like at the Toronto Zoo, this was an open display where you could walk right through the middle and the animals were free to range all around you! There were different types of kangaroos and pademelons, and also a couple of emus (which are really disconcerting up close, since they're taller than I am!). At last we came to the wombat cave. Inside there were viewing windows where you could watch the wombats sleeping - but no wombats! We made Jen pose by the wombat sculpture in the cave, figuring it was the closest we were going to get to the real thing. But once the photos were taken and we were turning to leave, I glanced into the viewing windows again - and there was a wombat! So she did get to see one in the end. Upon exiting the wombat exhibit we came across the echidnas, who were out and actively searching for food. They're SO CUTE in a nearsighted, large-clawed, prickly sort of way. We watched them for as long as we could.
We had one more exhibit to go through at this point - a giant aviary displaying a huge variety of Australian birds. We practically ran through it (as we entered, the announcement came over the PA system that the zoo was closing). I will have to go back there again. The aviary was probably about as long as a soccer field and had three different habitat zones in it, and everywhere you looked there were birds, birds, birds. Very cool.
So suffice it to say that by the end of the afternoon we had hiked about a zillion kilometers and our feet were pretty sore! All we managed to do tonight when we got home was to collapse on the couch and eat leftovers!
Tomorrow will be a serious baking day, as we try to get the rest of the cookies done for Friday's party. It's supposed to rain, so it'll be a good day to stay home and take a break.
