If you only knew.
Honestly — if you knew how many ridiculous things went awry in my kitchen year after year, you might laugh yourself to death.
Another year, another batch of recipe disasters. I can’t believe this is the fifth year I’m rounding up my kitchen mishaps, and even then it barely scratches the surface.
To be fair, this year wasn’t as catastrophic as 2012 or 2013, when I was deep in cookbook recipe testing and would ruin multiple recipes every week. Sometimes my brain confidently decides that odd combinations will work — spoiler: they don’t always.
If you need a confidence boost, here are past years of disasters:
And now — 2014.
The number of fails this year wasn’t as high as some previous years, but the quality of the fails sure made up for it. I blame one main thing: being pregnant and insisting that bizarre flavor pairings sounded amazing.
First, the usual suspects: muffins and cupcakes, cookies — basically anything that needs precise baking. I’ve got a habit of skipping the recipe the first time because I think I know what I’m doing. (I don’t.) I also have an ongoing experiment with loading things onto toast. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Here are the highlights.
One day while pregnant, I decided bacon, roasted butternut squash and eggs should all go together on toast. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it wasn’t great either. The flavor was muddled and it looked… unfortunate.
Not something I’ll be revisiting soon — must have been the wacky pregnancy cravings.
Remember that whole wheat banana bread snack cake I loved? I tried to replicate the idea with apple cider and apples. Apples are nothing like bananas. The result was awful: poor flavor, strange texture — a total mess.
Yes, I photographed it. I also enjoy torturing myself.
I also made what unintentionally resembled a meatloaf-shaped ice cream log. The idea was a healthier frozen treat with peanut butter, banana and chocolate, but it turned out hideous and completely flavorless.
Another experiment: stuffing a chicken with quinoa before roasting, then tucking herbs into strange places. The quinoa ended up mushy and disappointing.
These tiny peanut butter s’mores blondies looked promising at first, but the peanut butter blondie layer came out dry and burnt. I attempted this three times and couldn’t get it right. Lesson: some things are better between graham crackers.
I also made strawberry galettes that were pretty on the surface but flavorless. Soggy crusts, watery strawberries and a very sad chocolate ganache — no thank you.
In a frantic attempt to have holiday cookies ready, I spent weeks trying to perfect chewy vanilla spice cookies. Four attempts, four failures. This is the first December in years I didn’t share a single cookie recipe.
Perhaps my saddest failure: bacon-wrapped Nutella brownies. I’ve wanted to make them since a friend told me about them, but I couldn’t nail presentation or the perfect brownie texture in a muffin tin. They tasted amazing, but looked like roadkill.
But they’re coming back — once they stop resembling roadkill, you’ll be the first to know.
There were many other mishaps I didn’t photograph: some left me covered in food, some happened in public (like burning oven fries to a crisp in a cooking class and nearly setting a blender on fire). Despite it all, I almost always learn something and have a lot of fun along the way.
Thank you for indulging my disasters — and some of my favorite recipes too. You readers are my lifeline.
Now tell me: what was your biggest kitchen mess-up in 2014?