Lunchtime Survey: What Was Your Worst Baking Disaster?

Baking Week wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of baking disasters. We’ve had fallen cakes, burnt cakes, greasy cookies, burnt cookies, flat bread and burnt bread. (Sense a trend?) But every time we learn something and usually there’s a good story to tell too.

What was your worst baking disaster? Are you up for sharing it with the crowd? Anything really spectacular?

Ours started with over-ambition (baking disasters usually do). We were running a work event and catering in lunch every day, but we decided to bake dessert ourselves.

We put two huge sheet pans of chocolate cake in the oven early in the morning, then went to take a shower. Big mistake. When we came out of the bathroom we found…

…black smoke filling the kitchen and the oven – we couldn’t see the cakes through the smoke. They had both overflowed their pans, dripping dark black cake goo all over the coils. We could see flames.

Panicking, we scraped up the worst of the mess and let the cakes finish baking. We cut off all the corners where the gooey burnt mess was worst and served the cake with powdered sugar.

In the end we had rave reviews on the cake, and several people asked for the “secret ingredient.” See, it had this elusively smoky taste…

So it all worked out in the end – even the worst baking disasters tend to.

All right – your turn!