Let’s be honest–you get a bit of a thrill when I screw up, don’t you?
Lord knows I’ve screwed up enough on this blog to justify its name, and here are a few of my favorite disasters.
The picture above comes from a post called The Day My Pound Cake Threw Up. In that post I attempted to make Martha Stewart’s pound cake. I tested it with a piece of spaghetti (ever since I use a knife, so there’s more surface area for any uncooked bits to cling to–making it a better indicator.) As you can see in the photo, when I flipped the pound cake over from the pan it threw up. That was not a happy experience.
Neither were these:
* The time I tried to make peanut brittle, but ended up making Peanut Brittle Soup:
* The stickiest, goopiest, most miserable mess: Toasted Coconut Marshmallows from Hell:
* Suzanne Goin’s Caramel Tart, which was so rock-hard I needed a full-time dentist after one bite:
* There was this Blueberry Disaster which wasn’t so much a disaster as a disappointment–as are most of the recipes in Nancy Silverton’s slapdash book of quick, easy dinners, “A Twist of the Wrist.”
In fact, that book not only generated disappointments, it even generated an injury: see My Burnt Foot.
Of all these disasters, though, nothing was more disturbing or upsetting than the night I made Suzanne Goin’s Spiced Pork Stew from “Sunday Suppers at Lucques.” Now that is one of my hands-down favorite cookbooks, and this braise–which took more than a few hours to make–filled the apartment with such an enticing smell, I thought me and my guests (in this case, my old roommate Lauren) would be in heaven. But, alas, the recipe said to put a piece of plastic wrap on top of the pan, beneath the lid, before placing it in the oven. When it came out, several hours later, the plastic had melted into the dish!
I fished out as much as I could, but I must say that eating melted plastic after hours of work was not a particularly gratifying experience.
And thus we conclude the list of my biggest flops from five years of food-blogging. I suppose, relatively speaking, for an amateur cook, the list could’ve been much worse, right? Let’s hope in the next five years our successes far outnumber our debacles–though the debacles are certainly more entertaining.
P.S. I almost forgot to include a link to my “Failure” movie–click here. That experience certainly ranks high on the list.
