Galentines: Nothing can be a disaster when you have good company

This year, blasting Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” while cruising down Herriman Avenue, the two of us, along with senior Elora Pradhan, were excited for an afternoon of Galentine’s activities: baking, binging rom-coms on Netflix, trying on different face masks and more.

Galentine’s Day, coined by the TV show “Parks and Recreation,” is the day before Valentine’s Day dedicated to celebrating the love you share with your closest girlfriends. As Amy Poehler's “Parks and Rec” character Leslie Knope says, “Every February 13th, my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies. Plus frittatas.”

Excited to begin baking, we thought of a long list of Instagram and SnapChat-worthy treats. After flipping through pages and pages of vegan cookbooks (our version of trying to cancel out the bags of Hot Cheetos we had eaten a couple hours before), we settled on making fudgy vegan brownies in the shape of hearts, topped off with icing and sprinkles decorations.

After taking out all the materials, we searched wall to wall for cocoa powder, the most important ingredient for making brownies, and were disappointed to come across an empty Hershey Cocoa powder can. We struggled to think of another baked good we could make but were extremely limited by the bare pantry.

Disheartened, we took a break to watch rom-coms on the TV but came to the unfortunate realization that Katherine’s family had recently canceled Netflix. So instead, we were forced to watch videos on YouTube as we halfheartedly skipped through throwback Superwoman videos and kept up with our favorite fashion blogger, Jenn Im.

Determined to prevent our Galentine’s Day from becoming a complete disaster, we decided to return to baking. This time, we tried making banana ice cream by mashing up frozen bananas, a recipe we’d seen on Tasty. Since we wanted to finish the strong black coffee we had initially made for the brownies, we tossed the aromatic beverage into the banana ice cream mixture, which ended up being a huge mistake. The ice cream mixture turned sour and had an extremely off-putting aftertaste. After reluctantly eating it, we tossed the ice cream into the trash.

Michelle’s sweet tooth had yet to be satisfied, so we made a last attempt at creating a Galentine’s-worthy treat: a peanut butter mug cookie. One egg, two tablespoons of sugar and three tablespoons of peanut butter made a quicksand-like batter that didn’t look appetizing at all. After baking, it resembled a dry sponge and tasted like peanut butter-flavored bread — definitely not Instagram-worthy.

We gave up on baking and moved on to the junk food we had bought at Safeway earlier with the conclusion that Hot Cheetos and honey mustard pretzels are better than gourmet desserts anyway. Because we couldn’t find anything to watch, Michelle decided to torment us with her passion for horror movies, playing Youtube videos titled “Top 10 Scariest Horror Movie Scenes” and “Movies You Shouldn’t Watch Alone.”

Even though we almost peed our pants out of terror, we had a good time basking in junk food and good company. We might not have experienced the typical Galentine’s Day that Leslie Knope had envisioned, but we still celebrated the spirit of the day of romance by taking time to show appreciation for the stunning gals in our lives.