Welcome to a roundup of my most chaotic kitchen moments from the past year!
I’ve been sharing recipe misfires for over 15 years, and here’s my 2025 edition.
As always, I had plenty of culinary failures this year. These are a few I managed to photograph in the frustrating moment—when I remembered to reach for my phone.
This series is just a fun way to show the mess-ups that come with cooking a lot. I remake classic recipes constantly, and with that volume, failures are inevitable. I document them so we can all laugh about the chaos later.
What was your biggest recipe fail this year? Tell me—I want to hear all about it.
2025 Recipe Disasters
Earlier this week I burned a whole batch of bacon. This happens way more often than I’d like to admit.
I like my bacon super crispy, and it goes from perfectly crisp to charred in a split second.
A dry pasta bake with dried-out cheese and crunchy breadcrumbs—exactly what no one wants.
I experimented with a lot of chocolate-filled treats inspired by Dubai flavors this year, and many times the filling turned out too runny and never got the crunch I wanted.
The photography here looks like a blast from the past—very 2008 blog vibes.
These are breadsticks.
I know.
Sheet-pan cheesesteak chicken that came out gray and sad. Not appetizing.
Clearly I didn’t learn my lesson with the cheesesteak—round two of underwhelming results.
During my eggplant parm phase I kept burning the breaded eggplant. That one hurt.
Blackened skewers with peach salsa that simply didn’t work—the flavors clashed. I’ll try a better version this summer.
A very sad strawberry upside-down cake. It looked and felt deflated.
One of my early attempts at an eggnog sheet cake ended like this. Hilarious—definitely not the final version.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I made a lot of sourdough this year, and the biggest mishap was adding chocolate. It turned out odd—probably the wrong amount or the wrong method—ending up as an unpleasant burnt-sour chocolate flavor.
This dip was a confusing disaster: too much sour cream and an ill-advised drizzle of hot honey. I have no idea what I was thinking.
These glazed carrots were overdone, and my attempt at a ricotta concoction separated, leaving everything watery and unpleasant. Clearly a low point—hence the long sentence.
This was a strawberry slaw I was excited about but it flopped. I’ll revisit it in spring and aim for fewer fails in 2026.