Just in time for the Holidays: Baking disasters!
Ok, We all have had them and now its time to fess up. Baking disasters 101. Unfortunately I have had more than my share. Lets just say I am a much better pharmacist than I am a cook. I’ll never give Rachel Ray or Emeril a run for their money. Once I made pink macaroni and cheese. I’ll tell you about that later. I do keep trying and occasionally I’ll whip up with something really special and complicated..like Rice Krispie Bars.
No, actually I can do better than Rice Krispie bars. Sometimes however, it takes practice.
My mother, God bless her, was a wonderful cook. She had to be. Not only were things rather lean at our home, but Dad wouldn’t have taken us out to dinner anway. He hated to eat out. She could do amazing things with food. I loved her tuna casserole and hated her stuffed green peppers. To this day I cannot duplicate her french onion chicken and I miss it terribly.
I didn’t inherit her cooking skill, but to her credit, she did try to teach me. I give myself a C+.
This one earned me a F. I decided to try my hand at candy making. I had my mothers candy thermometer, my heavy pan and my directions. I had to melt sugar into a caramely syrup. The instructions said to constantly stir, so I did. I stirred….and stirred….and stirred. It started to liquefy and turn a nice caramel color but there was this small bit of off white that I couldn’t seem to get into solution. So I kept stirring. The more I stirred the more this white stringy stuff seemed to appear. I wondered if the sugar was crystalizing back out, but it couldn’t be, it was too hot. I just kept stirring and this white junk just kept appearing. I had enough. This stuff wasn’t going right at all. I pulled out the spatula and sat it on the spoon rest. OH MY, there was about 2 inches less of my spatula than I had started! I was dissolving my rubber spatula in the hot sugar. Apparently “heat resistant” doesn’t mean “heat proof”. Whups. That ended my candy making evening..and the useful life of a spatula.
THEN, once I decided to make shortbread for a function I was attending. I had made shortbread before, and in fact, I make really good shortbread, rich enough to clog your arteries right on the spot. I had always used a brownie pan for making my shortbread but a friend of mine had gifted me with some new cookie sheets, the insulated Air-Bake kind. Niiiice. She said they make perfect shortbread. I went thru all the preparatory machinations getting my shortbread ready for cooking, the whole batch fitting on one sheet, and put them in the oven. After 20 minutes or so they were done and I grabbed the cookie sheet and pulled it out. I lifted on edge slightly higher than the other. Before I could react, the entire batch slid off the cookie sheet and landed in a steaming heap on the bottom of the oven. I never had completely flat cookie sheets before and I had never had ones so slippery. What a mess. The whole thing was a loss, an hour of my time and a pound of butter wasted.
Next time: Pink Mac and Cheese and my Banana soup disaster.
I pass my melted spatula onto you–what have you ruined?
Tags: personal life, putting away the counting tray, sharing time | |