It's the last week of September and Nashville is buzzing in anticipation of the CMA's (Country Music Awards). All the hotels and limos in town are booked...it's a very special, much anticipated occasion for country music fans. I had no idea what was going on.
I get to the studio in the morning to prepare for the segment and find out that I'm on the show with a guy I've been a big fan of ever since I first saw him in a clip on Talk Soup. This guy, known to everyone as "The Balloon Man," inflates a giant balloon, then somehow crawls inside it and bounces around the stage. As if that weren't enough, he also juggles scarves in there, and then smokes a cigarette.
This show is taped before a live audience and then airs exactly one week later. But, when it's taped, everything is performed as if it were live. That means the breaks between segments are exactly as long as they will be on TV, and any mistakes are kept in. For that reason, we do a thorough rehearsal. The hosts aren't there and won't be included until the taping starts. That's usually the way it is. And most of the time I don't even get to meet the hosts until just moments before the show.
So after rehearsal I get an idea of how the segment should go: First I'll show everyone how to make some bogus Twinkies. Then Charlie Chase and Lorianne Crook will put on blindfolds, taste some Oreos and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and try to guess which are the real thing and which are the Top Secret Recipes clones. Got it.
So the show starts and about halfway through it's time for my segment. We do the usual banter about the book and why I wrote it, and whether or not any of the companies whose products I clone have called me up to complain about the recipes. I say something like, "No I haven't heard from any of these companies...and don't really expect to unless I do something stupid like go on national TV."
We get to making Twinkies and I show how to make the batter for the bogus Twinkie cake. I give the bowl of ingredients to Lorianne to mix in this electric mixer the show provided. While the camera's on her she's trying to figure out how to lower the blades to mix the batter. "How do you get it to go down?" she says (photo 1). Do you somehow get the feeling she doesn't cook much?
I help her lower the mixing blades and we leave her to do the mixing (photo 2). Charlie says, "Do you realize the danger we're in right now?"
When the batter is mixed we start with the filling. This is Lorianne mixing the filling for the Twinkie clone. See that hammer and real Twinkie (photo 3) right next to the bowl? That wrapped up Twinkie is about a year old. You know how everyone says a Twinkie will last forever with all of the preservatives in there? Not true. If we had the time on the show, I was going to take that hammer and smash the Twinkie with it. I tried it once at home and, I gotta tell ya -- a year-old Twinkie smashes into about a billion pieces. Yes, sir...an old Twinkie gets very, very petrified. And nothing's quite as funny as petrified Twinkie chunks flying everywhere.
When the filling is done, the hosts arm themselves with the pastry injection guns and begin squirting. Charlie's goes real well. Lorianne's...well. Just as she says, "How do I know when it's full?" hers explodes in half. Maybe you can see the blurry half of the Twinkie falling here (photo 4)?
After the Twinkie fun, we get to the taste-tests. First the hosts get to don their blindfolds. Lorianne gets a scarf and Charlie gets the customized "big eyes" blindfold (photo 6). First we try the Oreo. They each handle their own food which is usually the kiss of death for a taste-test. You can easily tell which Oreo is real by feeling the top of the cookie. They guess which is which after a bit of tasting, but say it's because of texture that they knew.
When taste-testing the Reese's, Charlie and Lorianne have a tougher time figuring out which is the real deal (photo 7).
The show goes great, nobody gets hurt...and up next is my hero -- the guy who obviously gets too little fresh air -- Balloon Man. And he's a big hit. Perhaps I need to work something like this into my cooking segments. I don't know...wrap myself up in Saran wrap, or foil perhaps?
Anyway, about a week later I get this tape of the show from the crew over at Crook & Chase. Apparently they send every guest a copy of the show. That's pretty cool. No other show had done that for me before. Not only do they send out a tape of the show, they personally sign the tape box (photo 8).
Included among the signatures from the Crook & Chase staff, Lorianne says, "Sorry I exploded your Twinkie -- but it tasted good anyway!"
Then Charlie says, "She exploded your what?"
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