kitchen disasters: my cake flop
Following my post on recipe deal breakers I thought it only fitting to open the discussion up to kitchen disasters. I would imagine many of your own deal breakers are directly connected to a specific disaster that has turned you off from completing future recipes with that same task/instrument/instruction/ingredient.
The cake in the image above was one of two that I made for my friend’s birthday. No, I didn’t make two cakes to appease the opposing chocolate and vanilla camps. I made two cakes because the first one was a complete disaster. You see, just as I began to make the batter I shattered my large glass mixing bowl into a million little pieces. I spent the next 40 minutes sweeping, mopping and vacuuming up tiny glass shards that were strewn about my kitchen. Frustrated and annoyed, I finished preparing my cakes and left them cooling on a rack on my counter. As I picked up the first layer to set on the cake plate for frosting, the cooling rack shifted and the second layer went flying over the edge of the counter and onto the floor. It too shattered (well maybe it was more of a mush). Normally I would have tried to salvage the crumbled cake (covered in enough frosting- who’s gonna know?!?), but my fear of serving my friends slices of cake littered with tiny glass shards was too much. I tossed it in the trash, threw my dirty dishes in the sink and called it quits. The next day I made another cake— one I was certain was glass-free.
As I typed up this post, it made me feel better to know I’m not the only Shelteriffic contributor with a cake-baking catastrophe. Last December, Angela told us all about her troubles with gingerbread. So, now it’s your turn to spill (pun intended) your kitchen disaster story. Go on, get it off your chest. — Erica P.
Yep. Done it. 14″ Scharrfenberger round cake, double layered on the floor. Arrgh. I’ll never forget it.
Small disaster compared to your tragedy, but over the weekend I made a Pink Lemonade pie and I interpreted “chilled” to mean “Refrigerated” when it really meant “Put in freezer.” It was soupy, but guests humored me anyway.
It’s much better now that it’s actually been frozen.
I’ve got a couple- first one was about 10 yrs ago, when I was a mere novice, and tried to make a lemon meringue cake (a Martha recipe). It involved a swiss meringue which had to be cooked and then whipped. Umm… The freaking stuff wouldn’t set, and kept splattering everywhere. It was a mess. I followed the directions and made the stuff 3 times. I almost threw the cake off the roof; but finally after the last attempt the stuff set enough to frost the cake, I gave in and accepted it. It did turn out great, but I’ll never make that recipe again.
Oh, and there was the time I was catering a birthday party and I stepped on the lasagna… Thankfully it was wrapped in towels to keep warm. I just kind of smooshed it back into shape.
i stayed up until 5:00 a.m. baking a cake from scratch trying to prove to my co-workers that cakes from scratch were better than box cakes.
i was up until 5:00 a.m. because my recipe measurements were off and i didn’t figure that out until i went through FOUR flat cakes. needless to say, i wasn’t looking too pretty when i bought the cake to the office that very morning.
I spent more than $100 on ingredients to make a double batch of Gourmet’s crab bisque this Christmas. It was delicious, except for the little bits of crab cartilage everyone kept pulling out of their mouths (yep, folks, when recipes say to inspect lump crabmeat for shells, they mean it!).
The first time I made waffles on my own, I got the ingredients confused and I accidentally used baking soda instead of powder (or vice versa) and I think I had the measurements wrong, too and … well, I don’t know how I managed it, but the waffles tasted like old fish. It was AWFUL.
Ah yes. The Ferry Boat Chocolate Chip Cookies Present. ugh. The whole day was a mess, but the part involving my cookies: four friends and I were stuck on the first miserable ferry ride of the day. It was raining, we had spent the last of our money, and we were all starving. So we tore into the supposed-to- be-a-gift cookies. They were amazing looking– the most yummy looking chocolate chip cookies you’ve ever seen. Well my friend took one huge bite, made an awful face and spit the whole thing out over the side of the boat. Apparently too much baking soda=cookies that taste like soap. I always taste the batter now. hah.
Too many to recount, but one most similar to shards of glass was a homemade veggie stroganoff (long story, but we were dying to see how it compares to traditional). Cream sauce in the blender. Round plastic top from the lid fell through. Completely obliterated in the sauce! But it was such a detailed, painstaking recipe we decided to try + save it. Putting the sauce through a strainer to catch the tiny pieces + picking through for the big ones. TOTAL nightmare + we still had the joy of biting down on a couple left behind. Ouch!
While frustrating @ the time, we are happy these things happen sometimes. It makes life interesting + you always have a funny story to reflect back on together or share w/others!
There was the time that I was making a cake to bring into work – I was finishing it up in the morning and as I was heating some honey in a saucepan, I turned my back for a moment and when I looked back it was overflowing and on fire. I have no recollection of what I did to put out the fire. Too much panic.
And then there was the six layer coconut cake. I used the wrong ingredients for the filling and I had to start over. There was no time for it all to set and I had to transport the cake knowing that it would fall over in the cake carrier. It took several hands to take the lid off the carrier and keep the cake intact. But it was quite tasty.
There are many horror stories at my house but my family’s favorite is the fish with cucumbers and ginger story. I was in high school, didn’t believe you could cook fish in 20 minutes, and was a little too generous with the ginger. Result? Pieces of fish that were so dry and shrunken they looked like gray shrimps interspersed with hacked up pieces of cucumber and GINGER SAUCE—all you could taste was that sauce. All that you could taste for hours afterwards was that damn sauce. We went to bed burping ginger. To this day my mother flinches when I say I’m going to make fish and my brother still hates ginger.
It was a perfect Thanksgiving. The out-of-town family had arrived for the feast and celebration, and my job was simple: make pumpkin pie, a.k.a. The Crowning Glory Of Any Thanksgiving Meal.
Post-dinner, we gathered to lift our forks in mutual pumpkin deliciousness. Yet instead of the spicy sweetness enhanced by the cloud of Cool Whip, disaster struck, and we spit our respective bites out in unison.
I had forgotten the sugar.
Luckily, an enterprising aunt had brought cannoli. Viva Turkey Day!
once i made lamb with mint sauce for a entire dinning room …… i poured the mint sauce IN with the lamb, (rather than a side garnish) and the result was a GREEN roast that even the tastiest mashed potatoes couldn’t save. and speaking of mashed potatoes…. once, while making them, i set the mixer on high speed which threw mashed potatoes all over the ceiling.
Ah, and here I was thinking I don’t cook much so of course I don’t have these kinds of disasters. But the crab cartilage story reminded me (maybe I blocked this out until now, so this is good therapy for me). When I was in college, occasionally I would participate in a vegetarian dinner at a hippie-dippie peace and justice house (not disparaging peace and justice, just setting the scene). The way it worked was that each participant had to choose a day to buy ingredients and prepare dinner. A friend and I decided to make a vegetarian shepherd’s pie — this was a big undertaking as we were probably feeding 25 people and I think I was about 18 or 19 at the time.
We spent an hour cutting up vegetables and mashing potatoes and cutting up garlic and….well, being as young as we were, we didn’t realize you were supposed to peel the garlic. We just chopped it up and threw it in, peel and all. I distinctly remember this dawning on me as I watched the kindly priest who ran the house picking garlic peel out of his mouth after every bite,
I volunteered to make a multi-layer birthday cake for a friend last fall. It happened to be an unusually warm weekend, and my un-air conditioned kitchen was hot hot hot. I’d made a pumpkin cake covered in cream cheese frosting and my plan was to put multi colored circles of gumpaste all over as decoration. Late as usual, I slapped the circles on the cake at the last minute and we left for the party. When I arrived and took out the cake, all of my cute circles had completely melted and started sliding down the cake, leaving a trail of gooey frosting in their wake. People said, “oh, what an INTERESTING looking cake” but by that point it was too late to do anything. Heat, cream cheese and gumpaste just don’t mix!
Here’s a shot of the cake in all its weepy mess.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2412/1661687891_51d5f65762_m.jpg
[...] 5. We’ve all had kitchen disasters. Kajola writes: “There was the time that I was making a cake to bring into work – I was finishing it up in the morning and as I was heating some honey in a saucepan, I turned my back for a moment and when I looked back it was overflowing and on fire. I have no recollection of what I did to put out the fire.” Click here to share kitchen disasters. [...]