culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop

What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet in a pre-heated 350-degree oven soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits - raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates - forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until they’re all swollen and sodden and gross. (I was trying to come up with a really disgusting Lovecraftian adjective to describe the distended, grotesque nature of the scent at this point, but I gave up.) These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.