Cake disaster at King Arthur Test Kitchen
We’ve been talking about kitchen mishaps, mostly of the messy variety, around here lately. At Casa 1Sentence, we started telling a few more cooking stories, of different types of kitchen mishaps.
Um, more like the type where the food comes out … awful.
I promised Monkey (as my daughter is known around here) that I wouldn’t tell you about her recent baking mishap. Instead, I’ll just say that it is important to measure the ingredients very carefully when you are baking.
Not to worry, though. I have plenty of my own stories to share.
Once, when I was in grade school, I made chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips. I was quite proud that I had made them all by myself. We didn’t have a lot of peanut butter chips, so I cut the recipe in half. My inexperienced eye read the amount of salt required as half a cup, which I carefully halved to one quarter of a cup. Of salt.
You can imagine what the cookies tasted like!
I didn’t know what had happened, so I left them out on the counter thinking that when my mom got home she would help me figure it out.
My poor mother came home late, and saw these delicious-looking cookies on the counter. She took a big bite of one, and then got that terrible aftertaste. Of course, she was also rather thirsty! She finally realized the problem, and threw out all my hard work.
Apparently, I have a problem with salt.
When you bake bread, salt is a critical ingredient. Salt inhibits rising, so it is carefully balanced with the yeast to make the dough rise the right amount. It works perfectly, unless you forget to add salt to the dough! Which I did, just last year.
Oh no, I can’t blame this one on youthful inexperience. I have to blame it on the forgetfulness (and distractions) of middle age. 😀
The dough never stopped rising. It was huge. And while it baked, it kept on rising. The bread was light and fluffy, for sure, but it tasted terrible. And no matter how long I baked it, it tasted under-cooked.
Lesson learned! Never leave out the salt when baking bread.
Today, I am going to bake some muffins for the kids to have for after-school snack. I’ll try to use just the right amount of salt.
I also enjoyed these stories from King Arthur’s Test Kitchen.
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My daughter and I were making cupcakes, and you were to mix the wet and dry ingredients separately…let’s just say cupcakes don’t work out if you forget the dry ingredients. It was quite a runny mess!
Oh no! Completely forgot the dry ingredients? That’s definitely a problem, LOL. Your daughter must have been so disappointed!
there are way too many. there was the mashed potato incident, the time i melted my kitchen floor cooking salmon, the chicken marsala debacle…the list goes on. my kitchen disasters are partly why i started my blog. i didn’t want anyone else to feel like they were the only ones turning their food, and their kitchens, into a steaming pile of failure!
“the time you melted your kitchen floor cooking salmon” — I think you might *have* to tell us that story. Oh dear.
I do so enjoy your blog. Your kitchen disasters and other thoughts are always entertaining. 🙂
it was when i started to bake on my own, without my mother’s supervision. everything was smooth initially, until i forgot whether i had put sugar to the cake mixture. then, i added sugar without tasting the mixture first, which i should have done earlier. and you can imagine how the cake tasted. it was extremely sweet! and the middle part somewhat ‘collapse’ because the ‘sweetness’ was too heavy. lols
How about adding too much baking powder and cutting a seemingly ok, if a little bloated, cake in half only to realise that much of the inside is hollow and filled with air! At least it never happened again.