What’d You Do Last Weekend?
Heading to a party where there will be lots of wine, and not sure what to take? How about some simple savory cookies - biscotti and sables made for wine pairing?
Epic Failures: Fall 2009
People tell me all the time about how intimidated they are to bake or cook for me because everything on my blog looks so good (said with emphasis). I always have to explain that I have my handy digital camera, and even though I'm not a very good photographer, I can take 20 pictures of something and I'm likely to come out with at least one pretty nice picture. That doesn't mean that I don't make a mess, and certainly I have my fair share of failures in the kitchen. Usually I can figure out what I did to mess things up, but sometimes I'm just at a loss and I chalk it up to something else like a bad recipe, a bad ingredient, or our oven acting weird.
I wanted to share some of those failures because this season I've been doing a lot more baking and cooking, so there have been a lot more failures in our kitchen.
The first mess I made was on candy. I made a peanut butter chocolate ganache that just wasn't what I wanted. I'd made this in the past and it was perfect, but this time didn't work out like that. I go into some detail in the post about what I did wrong - there are some good lessons in there if you're playing with chocolate.
My next mess was a little more ambitious. I tried curing and brining olives. Yeah. Right. We're pretty good at doing our own meat (in our little improvised hanging closet a.k.a. our basement stairwell), but olives were another project altogether. I might have had too many things going on, but I didn't heed some valuable advice from both Hank Shaw and Michael Ruhlman (go with lye!) and that was the end of the olive experiment for this year.
Finally, I blew it making potato rolls. Yes, super easy, anyone-can-do-it potato rolls. This one I chalk up to something else - only because I can't imagine I screwed this one up so bad myself! Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say, 'oh, those potatoes were GMO potatoes from some scary corporate entity and that made the starch go nuts when I used them in the dough...' In this case, I think I was just sloppy. Next time, I'll make something else.
What have you done in the kitchen that just hasn't worked? Share your stories! I'd love to know what you see as your own epic failures!
More Info
My Peanut Butter Chocolate Ganache failure
My Curing Olives experiment gone wrong
My sad Potato Rolls