Cooking failures

LissaC

LissaC

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I thought I'd start a thread where we could share our cooking failures. We all have them. We eventually laugh and learn from the experience, but some can be traumatic.

I'll share a couple of mine. Years ago I decided to make my own birthday cake. I love baking but I don't eat cake. I have a cookbook with different cake base and batter recipes and a variety of frostings and fillings. Each cake base had notes mentioning which frostings and fillings go well with it but somehow I missed this. And, because I don't eat cake, I don't really have the feeling for what goes well with what.

So I choose a base and a frosting that I thought would go well together and I baked my cake. After dinner, we sang happy birthday and I cut the cake. My then boyfriend tasted a bit of his slice and looked at his best friend. They looked at each other in disgust and set their plates aside. Turns out my cake was impossibly sweet. No one ate it and I threw it in the trash. I don't think I could force feed that cake to a hungry person if I tried to.

More recently I've done countless batches of failed homemade vegetable yogurt. Runny, too thick, smelly, I've done it all. I'm convinced the only thing that will get me homemade vegetable yogurt is a sacrifice to the devil. I'm taking the sacrificial chicken out of the freezer right now.

I decided that one of my failed coconut yogurt attempts would become coconut ice cream, so I added xanthan gum and put it in the freezer. You guessed it, I completely forgot to put the ice cream on the ice cream maker. You can imagine how my ice cream turned out. It's as if rock hard ice cream is back in style.

Hopefully, I'm not the only one failing miserably in the kitchen, please share your failures as well!
 
Oh, cakes and I don't get along. Every disaster that can happen with a cake, I've had happen: dense, dry, tough, curdled wet ingredients, sunken middle, undermixed, overmixed, raw in the middle, burnt on the edges, domed in the middle - I've had them all...sometimes in the same cake!
 
What, no flames or flying poultry?

I was camping with a bunch of friends (teardrop campers), and one friend was smoking a Turkey on a Brinkmann gas smoker.It wasn't on perfectly level ground. It was going fine, until he took off the lid one time, and the super-heated turkey grease spilled onto the burner, and FOOM! Six foot column of flames. The turkey got couple feet feet of air, too. Here he is surrounded by a bunch of people who have been drinking most of the day. After the initial shock was gone, and we knew nobody was hurt, we were all laughing and clapping.

He never lived that down. It was stuff of legend.

CD
 
caseydog said:
What, no flames or flying poultry?

I was camping with a bunch of friends (teardrop campers), and one friend was smoking a Turkey on a Brinkmann gas smoker.It wasn't on perfectly level ground. It was going fine, until he took off the lid one time, and the super-heated turkey grease spilled onto the burner, and FOOM! Six foot column of flames. The turkey got couple feet feet of air, too. Here he is surrounded by a bunch of people who have been drinking most of the day. After the initial shock was gone, and we knew nobody was hurt, we were all laughing and clapping.

He never lived that down. It was stuff of legend.

CD
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Ahahah I love this story :roflmao: You don't make this kind of memories with perfectly cooked turkey!
 
did a spectacular flop the other day....

recipe for crab imperial from a (well know site - nameless to avoid . . .)
$32 of jumbo lump crab meat involved.

a lot of mushrooms, sauted
undiluted can of cream of mushroom soup
s&p
milk
add precooked rotini
add crab
crushed ritz topping
bake

it was inedible. I washed the sauce off in a colander, rescued the crab meat, tossed the rest.
did crab cakes last night -
 
Last year I tried making a fancy raspberry reduction for boneless chops. It didn't quite taste right. I tried tweaking it. Still didn't taste right. After about "20" tweaks, with it getting worse each time. My son suggested that I take it out to the field and dump it. It was so bad that he didn't want me putting it down the garbage disposal lol.
 
I have been racking my brain for a personal cooking failure to post, but my problem is that, even though I make them, I don't dwell on them. I make something bad, taste it, say "that sucks," and throw it away and order a pizza.

I haven't done anything memorably bad, like a launch a turkey.

I'll keep thinking about it. There has to be something I remember, knowing that I generally cook without recipes.

CD
 
Many years ago tried to make a baked pasta dish with bow tie pasta, ricotta, eggs, Parmesan, cream and spinach. It turned out to be one big giant green blob. Trash can material.

There have been more along the way - this is the one still gets laughs from hubby.
 
I've made some of the classics, like making baked potatoes without poking holes in the spuds. BOOM! Oven full of potato guts. And, it's even worse if you use a microwave.

And this one. You stick a bag of microwave popcorn in the office break room microwave, set the timer per the instructions, and walk out of the room, planning to come back when your popcorn is done. You spend the rest of the day apologizing for the burnt popcorn smell permeating the office.

CD
 
caseydog said:
I've made some of the classics, like making baked potatoes without poking holes in the spuds. BOOM! Oven full of potato guts. And, it's even worse if you use a microwave.

And this one. You stick a bag of microwave popcorn in the office break room microwave, set the timer per the instructions, and walk out of the room, planning to come back when your popcorn is done. You spend the rest of the day apologizing for the burnt popcorn smell permeating the office.

CD
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Now I'm thankful that I only burn popcorn at home. Completely ruined one of my favorite pans. Also burned one of mom's pans when I was 16. The smell was so bad we had to open all doors and windows and take the pan out to the garden there was a weird brown smoke coming out of it.
 
caseydog said:
I've made some of the classics, like making baked potatoes without poking holes in the spuds. BOOM! Oven full of potato guts. And, it's even worse if you use a microwave.

And this one. You stick a bag of microwave popcorn in the office break room microwave, set the timer per the instructions, and walk out of the room, planning to come back when your popcorn is done. You spend the rest of the day apologizing for the burnt popcorn smell permeating the office.

CD
Click to expand...
Your Exploding potato reminded me of another disaster of mine just last fall. Brand new microwave maybe three days old, spaghetti squash, "properly poked" or so I thought. Cooked 5 minutes, still hard, rotated and before the next 5 minute cooking cycle was complete - KABOOM!!!!

Yes, it was a mess! I guess the holes did not permeate deep enough.
 
caseydog said:
I've made some of the classics, like making baked potatoes without poking holes in the spuds. BOOM! Oven full of potato guts. And, it's even worse if you use a microwave.
Click to expand...

I never poke holes in baked potatoes (microwave potatoes included) and this has never happened to me in 45 years of cooking. :scratchhead:Maybe I'm simply lucky.

I did once put a tinned pie in the microwave and forgot to open the can first. Yeah - I know that tinned pies are really weird but my partner likes them. I think I have a spectacular picture somewhere...
 
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