apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

At Christmas time I was making shortbread cookies. I was in a rush because I was also baking many other things to put in baskets for my co-workers. I must not have read the recipe clearly, because I was supposed to refrigerate the dough before making the cookies. They turned out flat and hard.

During Christmas baking time this year, I caught my cat, a number of times, eating and running away with my various desserts (cookies, cupcakes, etc). He also decided it would be fun to walk all over some peanut butter fudge I had made :( I also managed to drop a small bowl full of melted chocolate, for truffles, on the floor during in this same few days....sigh.

I'd just moved into a new apartment and was getting used to the kitchen. I'd tried to roast a chicken, and for some reason, all the veggies had turned to carbon and the bird had burnt. I figured I'd botched it somehow. A few days later, I tried a reliable French loaf recipe--it burned! It took two more botched recipes for me to figure out that my oven temp was way off. I finally bought an oven thermometer and found out that my oven baked at an average of 80 degrees hotter than I was setting it. D'oh!

Trying to do holiday baking with my grandmother visiting...

Oven wasn't calibrated quite right, first batch burnt on the bottom, discovered my oven mitt wasn't very good, burned myself, cookie sheet went flying and cookies all over the floor.

My grandmother's comment, "Well, you're just trying to do too much." Followed by endless questions of "What is wrong with the oven? Is it going to catch fire?"

It was not a pleasant holiday.

My worst would have to be the Miss America Cake - every year my SIL would have a party for the Miss America Pagent, and I would bring a dessert of some sort. One year, I planned to make the Miss America Cake (like the Barbie cakes for little girls) where the gown is the cake. I tried to make the cake in a Pyrex bowl and it never cooked in the middle - raw and gooey. I tried again in a differently shaped bowl with the same results. Let's just say that in a fit of baking rage, Miss America and her gown ended up broken, in the trash, and in my best Scarlett O'Hara voice I said that "I will never bake a Miss America Cake again!"

When I was learning to bake my cakes consistently fell, and looking back I see my mom had huge patience letting me continue to bake week after week, mess after mess. I thought I was getting better, but I remember my brother peering into a cooling pan of something chocolate and inquiring, "Is it brownies? Or did C bake a cake?"

I made a last-minute birthday cake for my mom a couple years ago that came out great! The secret? I wasn't the designated baker, and had already had a couple of beers when I was press-ganged to make dessert. You just gotta relax...

When I was a kid, my friend and I wanted to make brownies from scratch. Somehow we added 1/2 cup of salt instead of 1/2 teaspoon. Luckily we realized this before we put the brownies into the oven, but we had to start all over again (we did try to feed the batter to the neighbor's horses, but they wouldn't eat it). With the second batch, we forgot to add the sugar. We noticed this before it went into the oven and added sugar, but the brownies did not come out right - they were very surgary and kind of crunchy. We learned that you really do have to add the ingredients in order!

Mishaps with silicone - before I decided to scrap the flimsy things and go straight to the old favorites, I had a few batches of banana bread batter go straight on the floor. Clumsy cook flimsy material = disaster.

along pierrot's lines...I once substituted grits for oatmeal in a childhood chocolate-oatmeal-cookie-baking-incident. Don't try that at homes, kids. yuck!

Testing the very first recipe for my book, a pecan tart, I removed the finished tart from the over with my hand underneath the pan. It was the kind with the removable bottom, and so rather quickly a ring of 350-degree stainless steel became a bracelet, stuck on my wrist because of the way I was balancing the tart. I still have the scar.

I was once hosting a game night for all my cousins and decided to make a Pumpkin Spiced Bread, from scratch, to share while we all hung out. Literally moments before they all arrived I pulled the beautiful bread from the oven, slid a knife around the edges of the pan to loosen, flipped the bread over into my oven mitt and when I went to place it bottom down on the serving plate... I missed! And the WHOLE thing flopped down on my kitchen floor!!!

Luckily one of my cousins had brought brownies and saved the day!

I'm not the designated baker in the family, so this is a borrowed story from my sister: Never having encountered little sticks of butter before (perhaps they are less common in Canada), she put one and a half blocks of butter (1.5 lbs) into a cake instead of one and a half sticks (3/8 lb). Needless to say, it was a disaster.

And perhaps I might suggest another thread based on Sara Kate's story: cooking-related scars.

I baked a pie for Christmas 2006 that dripped quite a lot in my oven. I put a pyrex pan underneath to catch the dripping and after the pie came out, I put the pyrex pan in the sink and flipped on the cold water. A split second before the water hit the glass pan that was heated to a nice 425 degrees, I thought "Oh Crap!" and took a step backwards. The water hit the pan and it exploded into thousands of glass shards. I think I shaved a few years off my life with that experience.

A very close family friend makes my husband's favorite cake. I mentioned one time that I wasn't much of a baker and she said, "ANYone can bake this cake." A few months later, after our wedding, she sent me the dry ingredients, pan, recipe and a sweet note of encouragement as a wedding present

I was so excited to bake this cake for my new husband. I very carefully measured and mixed all ingredients and put the pan in the oven. I felt this satisfaction that I had never felt before and wanted my cake to impress him so much.

When we started smelling smoke I ran to the oven and immediately noticed that somehow (!) the oven dial was set on 525 and not whatever the recipe required. My new husband's favorite cake was charcoal, the pan ruined and I was heartbroken.

Years later he still mentions that first cake almost every time I bake a cake.

I left the baking powder out of the cake. The two layers were like pancakes!

After having a couple friends over for an impromptu dinner, I decided to make a quick batch of brownies for dessert. Soon after I stuck them in the oven, we started smelling something strangely burnt and chemical-like. It turns out, I'd left a roach trap in the oven...

Sara Kate, I was just about to post the exact same story! Mine was a French apple tart and I still have burns from the hula-hoop route down my arm. Plus, of course, the tart went flying. I was really burnt and really mad! My husband still ate a bunch of the tart but I think it was just to make me feel better... he's nice.

oh, and speaking of baking scars.. my old oven was at eye level and when you opened the door it was at waist level... with the metal door at around 450 degrees. How many times do you need to burn that little gap of flesh between your jeans and your shirt before you learn not to lean into that oven? Apparently like 500 times.

Oh man, when I first was living on my own, I overzealously decided to make a large batch of frosted sugar cookies for Christmas. I hardly ever baked. I used an old handmixer that had been passed down from old roommates long before. As I was mixing the icing for the cookies, I notice small globs flying out of the body of the mixer. To my horror, I discovered that MEALWORMS were shooting out of the motor of the mixer and into my icing! Flour must have gotten in through the grates long ago and bred the little buggers. Needless to say, I gave up on Christmas cookies right then and there. I've never made them since.

I was trying to make some browned butter for a brown-butter icing idea I had, but I burned the butter, then tried to salvage it by straining it through one of those reusable coffee filters (with a plastic frame)...of course the butter--which smelled pretty unpleasant at this point--melted right through the plastic, then right through the PLASTIC cup i was straining it into (I know, not my brightest moment) and got ALL OVER the counters, stove, sink, etc. It smelled terrible and was a mess to clean up.

Mo, that's disgusting. I think I'll never eat a sugar cookie again.

I've never had a real baking disaster (yet), but I was making a flan years ago and after caramelizing the sugar for the topping and pouring it into the bottom of the pan, I looked at the spoon and the saucepan and thought "mmmmm, melty caramel!". While in the midst of leaving a voicemail for a friend (for whom I was making the flan, coincidentally), I shoved the spoon straight from the pan onto my tongue, burned the hell out of my mouth, and left a voicemail consisting of inarticulate screams of pain.

My worst disaster was yesterday--the cupcakes I made for my husband's birthday did not turn out right. They were chocolate coconut cupcakes that were highly rated from a usually reliable source.

I don't know what I did wrong, but they are not cake-like at all. Not one single crumb. They are more like rubber or really bad bread pudding. I reviewed the recipe and still don't know what I did wrong.

Luckily my husband and daughter will eat anything made of chocolate, esp. when you put a lot of frosting and whipped cream on it.

My boyfriend and I had hosted a few friends for a pasta dinner, which had all turned out well. We were sitting around after dinner, and I decided to whip up a quick batch of the quick shortbread cookies I had made before from his grandmother's recipe. Only for some reason I buttered the cookie sheet. The recipe called for several sticks of butter, and with the added butter on the sheet (and maybe I didn't preheat the oven long enough) the cookies didn't bake, they melted. When I pulled the pan out of the oven, the cookies were just puddles of butter and goo, dribbling off the edges of the pan. My boyfriend and friends just about died laughing.

Mine's from work. I used to work for a place in Portland called Marsee Foods as a night baker. Names have been changed.
My shifts were from 3 to 11 pm. All of our projects were big. There were no little jobs to take up time with, it was just 60 to 80 qt batches of product. And most of them took me a long time to do. One night, our list was pretty big. It was our new hire's first day. His name was Rex and he was a bit weird, but we liked him.
The day was going badly. I had been assigned Brownies and Banana bread. At home, these projects take little to no time, but Marsee numbers were huge. The banana bread was baked in long dirty pans that had to be lined individually with paper. We had to cut the paper to fit, and most of it stuck up over the top. We baked in convection ovens, so we had to take some excess batter, smear it on the outside of the pan and then fold the paper over onto the smeared batter. When making like, 40 pans of the shit, this takes forever. I decided to speed things up a bit and get my butter melting for the brownies.
Again with the huge batches. For those who do not know what a Rondo and a Cooker are, let me explain poorly. A rondo is a very large, very shallow cooking pot. It's maybe 6" tall and about two feet in diameter. A cooker is a special burner with very large flames. It sits on the floor and comes up to about the average person's knees. Picture a gas stove. The flames are right up next to the metal grate your pot sits on, yes? On a cooker, the flames are about 8" below the metal grate. We used the rondo and cooker to melt butter and heat water, that kind of thing. So I plopped 25 pounds of butter in the rondo, hauled it over to the cooker and set it to melt. I got the banana bread in the oven and went to check on the butter. In 15 minutes, the butter had just begun to melt at the edges. So I turned the heat up. I went to do some other things. A little while later, I saw this strange glow out of the corner of my eye. One of our bread bakers said, "Uh, hey you guys got a fire over here."
Flames, at least six feet high were coming out of the rondo. The butter had melted, boiled over and hit the fire. I was 19. All I could do was stand and stare at the fire I had made. I'm pretty sure my mouth was hanging open. The bread baker grabbed a fire extinguisher and did his thing with it. I turned off the gas finally and nearly burst into tears. My boss, Katy said, "Wow! No one has ever made a fire that Big before!" She was genuinely pleased. We poured the butter into a bucket and stuck it in the freezer to throw out later. (We never did. For all I know, it's still in there.) Our Chef told Bread Guy that he should have used a sheet pan to put out the fire. He didn't see the flames.
A little while later, the timer for the banana bread went off. I went to check on it. There was something supremely wrong with the banana bread. It was a strange sickly color and it hadn't risen at all. In fact, it was sinking in the middle. I stuck my paring knife in it and it seemed clean. Katy looked at the bread and said, "That's really fucked up. You're going to have to do another batch."
I lost it. I was so angry at myself and at the day. I had set a god damned fire and I had to redo a project that took me almost three hours to complete. I turned and hurled my paring knife as hard as I could aiming for nowhere.
And came within a few inches of hitting Rex. Katy yelled and shouted, something about throwing knives and writing me up. I don't really remember. But I will remember that day forever as my very worst baking disaster.

nadarine - You're making me cringe and laugh at the same time.

Ouch Sara Kate and MGN!!! My mother has double wall ovens as well and I've burnt my shirt on the top one a couple times.

I guess I could say the first thing I ever made on my own was my one and only baking disaster. I was probably 8. It was a spiced cake and I put in a tablespoon or so of baking soda as opposed to a teaspoon. It was the nastiest thing I ever tasted. Ironically, it sunk instead of rising. :) And I'm still hesitant to this day on adding the full called-for amount of baking soda to anything.

Ha! What a great thread.

My worst was when I decided to make this amazing-sounding Quaker lemon pie from a recipe in Saveur. I'm a crappy baker, and only made one other pie in my life. But the recipe, using fresh lemons, sugar and little else, seemed so simple.

But of course it was not. The lemons had to be sliced paper-thin, then layered with sugar and left to sit for 24 hours. Then I decided to make my crust from scratch. It sucked but I did it and it turned out awesome. In went the lemons. I baked it. It looked lovely on the way out of the oven, just like the pix in the magazine. I left it on the counter to cool, and went out to the garage to tell Husband it was almost ready. That took me all of 15, 20 seconds seconds, and we came back in together.

There is the Pyrex pie dish face-down on the floor, empty and licked clean!

Our old boxer mix, Abraham, was hiding in the bedroom, sitting facing the wall and shaking. When he turned around his snout was all covered in flaky crust and we were like YOU PUNK! You would not BELIEVE how gross his poop was the next few days. I hope it was worth it, Abe.

i haven't had a baking disaster - my sister caught my hair on fire making edible play-dough on the stove when i was very young, and had VERY long hair.

my mother, on the other hand, had a baking RELATED disaster - she made bread pudding for some of her artsy college friends and as she was carrying it from the kitchen to the dinner table - which was decorated with little tea-lights on the big window behind it - good ol' butterfingers dropped it on the floor. everyone, of course, cracked up, and one of her friends, leaning back from laughing wholeheartedly, had apparently leaned back into the candle and caught his hair on fire - he did not notice it until the laughter turned from my mother's floor-bread-pudding to the stream of smoke emitting from the top of his head.

Reading Zora's commercial baking horrorshow reminds me of my (very short-term) commerical baking gig this summer- it ended rather abruptly when, at the end of my third week on the job, the enormous walk-in convection oven blew up. Yes, BLEW UP.
I'd just put in a big batch of coffeecakes and had walked across the floor to start mixing a gigantic vat of puff dough when BOOM: there's a giant explosion from the walk-in oven, complete with black smoke, flames, and the door being blown off. I hit the floor behind a mixer and cowered there until the flames and smoke cleared.
I quit the next week, in no small part due to the head honcho's insistence that there was "no need to call a repairman in" for the oven, and that we should just keep using it. Hell NO.

I hosted a dinner party before a high school semi-formal dance. My mom and I cooked furiously for a couple of days. We lived in Maine and used our screened-in porch as extra refrigerator space.
We started to bring things in on the afternoon of the party and noticed something odd. Squirrel footprints! They were across the top of the flan and the twice-baked potatoes. Thankfully, everything was covered in lots of plastic wrap.

When I was a teen and very into baking, I made A LOT of applesauce chocolate chip cake (we had a prolific apple tree and often just grated the apples in the Cuisinart)! But one time, I put baking soda instead of baking powder (I think it was that way, maybe the other) and ended up with something that didn't rise at all. We called it "pate," because it was made in loaf pans that time, instead of cake It still tasted good, so ate it anyway. My mom still cracks up over this, 30 years later. I'll never live it down in my family, but my mom has had some major goofs, so we give her a hard time, too.

Ok, I just read all of the above, after I posted and am glad that I worked in a small bakery across the street from HS AFTER my above baking disaster.

The first weekend the new owner, someone who used to make and decorate cakes in Beverly Hills, had it (about a month after I started working) had six wedding cakes on Saturday.

She took me on the first one to show me how it was done. There was a carpet under the table where the cake was to go. We asked if they wanted to remove the rug. They said no. We set up the cake. We left the house where the reception was and ran out of gas about a mile from the closest gas station. We walked over, got gas, called the bakery (from a pay phone at the station--this was in the early 1980s) to let them know we were running late, but we were on our way.

We drove back and when we walked in, the rest of the staff looked like someone had died. The cake we'd just set up collapsed. Why? We'll get to that.

The owner called her husband from the next town over and with one time watching, I was going to have to set up 2 wedding cakes on my own.

Now this was June in Southern CA, the land of perpetual drought. We go to the first location for one of the local county judge's daughter's wedding, and the cake is supposed to get set up outside by the pool, overlooking the ocean, islands and plain. We asked if they wanted to move the cake inside, 'cause it looked like it was going to rain. The lady said no, she'd stand over it with an umbrella if it did. OK, I set it up, finished it.

Off and we went to the next one, at the Officer's Club at the Pt Mugu Naval Station. It started raining on the way--big monsoon drops. We get to the O Club and Gene can tell my 16 YO nerves are shot so he says, "you want me to try?" He does three squirts with the icing bag and says "nope, you're better." I lean over to do the rest, and right above my head, one of the lightbulbs explodes. This brings the base fire department to the scene. We finally get the job done and head back to the bakery.

We get there and the owner gets back after taking another layer she's decorated to replace the one that "exploded." Want to know why? BECAUSE THEY TRIED TO MOVE THE DAMN RUG!!!

Luckily the rest of the cakes were pickups, except the one she was taking to her neighbor's wedding that night.

Talk about trial by fire!