A rose is a rose is a… pile of Doritos stuck together in the shape of a rose?
The chips company is getting fans riled up this Valentine’s Day with the offer of hand-delivering a bouquet of long-stem Doritos “roses” to your love (or enemy, depending on how you feel about orange crumbs) — but there’s a catch. The promotion is available only in Canada.
Luckily, my whole life has been building up to the challenge of making Doritos roses. Fifteen minutes after hearing about all of this, I was in my kitchen with a bag of Doritos from 7-Eleven, purchased from a clerk who was nice enough not to question why I was buying a bag of Doritos at 6am.
Doritos roses are hard to make. I don’t recommend it. There are very few chips in the bag that work for the rose shape; if you really want to make a dozen, you’ll probably have to buy several bags of chips, and have many leftover chips that you’ll eat in one sitting sometime this weekend. But if you must, here’s how to do it:
1. Root around the bag for five or six triangular, not broken or folded over, perfectly concave chips. Set aside.
2. Melt 1/2 cup white chocolate chips until just melted (so the chocolate will harden faster when you use it to “glue” together the chips). I only had regular chocolate chips and I wasn’t about to go back to 7-Eleven, so I used those. Not quite as pretty, but it was fine.
3. Grab two chips and hold both so they’re curling toward you. Use the back of a spoon to dab a bit of melted white chocolate on the bottom tip of one triangle; attach it to the bottom tip of the other. Hold tightly until set, about 1 minute. Grab another chip and repeat, working in a circle until you finish the outer petals (the frame) of your rose.
4. Root around the bag for some folded-over chips of the right size and shape to be the center petals of your rose. Use melted white chocolate to stick them in the middle.
5. Realize how long that took and decide this will be a single-rose bouquet. That’s more romantic, anyway.
6. Pull out the spinach leaves you have in your fridge because your boyfriend convinced you that you were both going to start drinking green smoothies and arrange them in a vase, or, if you can’t find a vase, a water bottle you got for free somewhere. Nestle the Doritos rose in the leaves.
7. Leave vase in the middle of the dining room table for your partner/roommate/cat to notice when he/she gets home/wakes up from a windowsill nap. Feel okay not giving any kind of present on Sunday because Doritos roses a lone Doritos rose is the surest sign of True Love.
Note: Instructions adapted from the Doritos site, which defeats the entire point of an edible chip bouquet by telling you to use a fake stem and actual glue.
mconrad@tribpub.com
Twitter @marissa_conrad
