2014 Recipe Disasters.
If you even knew.
No really. If you even knew just HOW many screwy things happened in my kitchen year after year, you would probably die.
Another year… another whole batch of recipe disasters! I can’t believe this is the fifth year that I’m sharing my many mess-ups in the kitchen, but at the same time, this isn’t even half of it.
To be fair, this year wasn’t quite as terrible as 2012 or 2013, the years when I was full-on cookbook recipe testing and destroying multiple recipes per week. I don’t know why my brain thinks certain things will work sometimes.
If you need something to make you feel better about yourself:
AND NOW! 2014.
While the fails this year didn’t match the quantity of previous years, the level of the fails did and I can only chock that up to one thing: being knocked up and thinking that weird stuff tasted great together.
First up, things I destroy in my kitchen on the reg: muffins and cupcakes. Cookies. Basically anything that needs BAKED – because I think I’m smart enough to do it without a recipe the first time. (spoiler alert: I’m not.) I also put a lot of crap on toast. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.
Here are the highlights!
One day… while I pregnant (obviously… ) I decided that bacon and butternut squash and eggs should go together on toast. It wasn’t exactly, um, TERRIBLE, but it wasn’t excellent either. And it looks pretty atrocious, so yeah. There’s that.
This is not something I’ll be revisiting any time soon – must have been all those wacky hormones.
Remember when I made this awesome whole wheat banana bread snack cake? I attempted to do the same with apple cider and apples… which are nothing like bananas. Duh. This was BAD. The flavor was bad. The texture was lacking. The whole thing was a mess.
Why did I even photograph it? Because I enjoy torturing myself.
Um, I don’t really know what to say about this one, besides I swear that I wasn’t trying to make a meatloaf-looking ice cream log.
This was some attempt at a healthier frozen dessert with peanut butter, banana and chocolate and not only was it hideous, it had ZERO flavor.
I tried to stuff a chicken with quinoa before roasting it and then stuck herbs in inappropriate places.
Know what the quinoa tasted like? Mushier-than-usual quinoa. It.was.terrible.
These adorable little peanut butter s’mores blondies don’t look so bad, right?
Ugh. The peanut butter blondie layer totally SUCKED – it was dry and burnt and I tried three times to get exactly what I wanted with no luck. Some things are better left spread inside of a graham cracker.
What these little strawberry galettes gave us in pretty presentation, they completely lacked in flavor.
It was a lovely combo of soggy pie crust, watery, flavorless strawberries and the saddest chocolate ganache ever. No go.
A few weeks ago, in an attempt to have some holiday cookies ready to go, I tried four times to get these chewy vanilla spice cookies just right.
Four tries, four fails. This is the first December I didn’t share one darn cookie recipe!
Perhaps my saddest failure this year were these not-so-lovely but insanely delicious bacon wrapped nutella brownies. I’ve wanted to make them since my friend Nick from DeLallo’s told me about them, but I have yet to nail the perfect presentation. Well, and the perfect brownie in a muffin tin. Oye.
Let’s not talk about what that really looks like.
These are definitely happening, and you’ll be the first to know about it as soon as they no longer resemble road kill.
So yeah, that’s that. Tons of other things happened too – ones I forgot to document, ones that left me covered in food and made it impossible to document, ones that happened in public, like the time I burnt oven fries to a blackened crisp in a cooking class and almost caught the blender on fire. I gotta admit though: it’s totally fun and I almost always learn something. Huh. Guess that really works.
Thank you for indulging me in my many disasters but also – some of my most favorite recipes. You guys are my lifeline.
Now you have to tell me… what was your BIGGEST mess up in 2014?!
70 Comments on “2014 Recipe Disasters.”
2014 was the year of curdled eggs. I tried three or four times to make cornbread that called for melted butter to be added to the eggs. No matter how hard I tried to temper everything…curdled eggs. So. Nasty. Finally I went “screw it” and made jiffy cornbread in my cast iron skillet. Take that. So now I just avoid any recipe with melted butter and eggs except my mom’s waffle recipe because that I don’t have issues with, but other melted butter/eggs recipes I tried had the same result. Stupid eggs.
These posts are always so good for a laugh. Especially that last photo…bahahaha!!
Some of your mess ups are so pretty. I had more than my share of mess ups in the kitchen….mine are usually much less photogenic!!
The meatloaf ice cream log is very funny! Thank you for the chuckle. I had more than my usual share of failures this holiday…eggnog coffee cake (for my coworkers!) that I over baked (but didn’t know until it was cut at work), doughy homemade rolls for Christmas Eve dinner that I then reheated until they were puck-like, an entire batch of mandarin pancakes for moo shu that I put in the trash on Christmas day and for the fifth year in a row, failed vegetarian gravy (my son actually asked me to give up trying-he’ll just eat non-vegetarian gravy). Thanks for letting me vent.
I always love this list! It makes me feel normal. Meatloaf ice cream log!
Not really a recipe, but 2 days ago I made these deliciously-stacked sandwiches for my husband and me for dinner. I scream “dinner’s ready” and grab the bag of (TJ’s) bread to tie it off and as I look down, I notice the whole thing is covered in blue mold. The bread was only 3 days old. So, into the trash the furry sandwiches went. How I didn’t notice the mold before building these “I-put-the-entire-contents-of-the-fridge” sandwiches, I don’t know. But man, what a disappointment. I then proceeded to make a classy meal of tortellini and potato chips. Um.. yeah.
Hahahhaha… Yum!!
so yum! ;)
I tried to make sugar cookies for Christmas, they tasted like card board. I ended up buying the packaged chocolate chip cookies that you just pull apart and bake….so much better and no clean up. lol
great post! Love that you share your fails. If you spend time in the kitchen they are always gonna happen and good job really as they always teach you something and are something to giggle about later!
Flat cookies always frustrate me the most. Luckily they still tend to taste good…ice cream topping anyone?
I love this post every year and I look forward to it so much – so thank you!! In fact, juts 2 days ago I thought, well any day now she’s going to be posting her blunders and bloopers post and voila :)
I have the worst luck with muffins. If I try to wing in, they never come out right. I never get that nice domed, puffy top. I get a flat top, or something that looks like those brownies of yours, a top that just runs all over the pan. Which I do think brownies in a muffin pan can be very tricky as well!
I think it’s amazing that you tried 4x to get the sugar cookies you wanted right when you were like 9 mos pregnant!
Thanks for a wonderful year and always sharing so openly and giving us amazingly creative recipes and writing!!!! xoxo
Love this. I think we all had a good share of kitchen fails. How does chocolate + beets cake sound? In the moment sounded delish but tasted not so much . Merry Christmas to your new family!
Trust me…chocolate cake with beets is the best chocolate cake on this earth. Keep trying. I’ve been a serious cook for 50 years and I would not joke about chocolate cake.
THAT LOAF!!! OMG. Are you sure that’s not peanut covered meatloaf? ;) Love you!!
tried to make individual pumpkin cheesecakes for the thanksgiving potluck at work. Didn’t realize until half way through the recipe I had no Cream cheese. ran down to the Walgreens on the corner in my PJ’s only to find out they don’t carry cream cheese, but I didn’t want to run home and drive somewhere so I bought vanilla coffee creamer and dumped that in. I ended up with violent orange mushy pools of pumpkin cream…custard? that my nephews reassured me tasted better then they looked. .
One of my favorite posts of the year. My favorite is chicken with herbs in inappropriate places. Ha! Thanks for all you do to bring us great recipes all year!
I love this. Brownies from scratch are my major fail. I tried 3 times and each time I ended up with tasteless brownie cake!! Doesn’t matter how much flour I left out or butter I added, they were just awful. On the bright side, I loved the crap out of my food processor and your cookbook so thanks for that!
Is it terrible that I’ve been waiting for this post?! As horrible as it sounds, I love seeing that you have recipe fails too! My worst recipe fail this year was when I tried to bake an entire watermelon (I know, I know!) because I’d seen a recipe for baked watermelon something and decided it was a good idea…
I genuinely laughed aloud at some of these pictures, remembering my own faulty food failures. I love this post because it’s nice to see the OTHER side of cooking once in a while!
My biggest mess up this year was a batch of “healthy” cookies that came out dry, lifeless and resembling forest animal…ahem…scat.
Face palm forsure!
Emily
zuzankosjournal.blogspot.ca
Hahahaha! this is the best. I love seeing what goes wrong as well as what goes right.
So human. So funny. That last one… yeah, definitely looks… um… you know.
Valentina
I tried to make a french silk pie for my boyfriend’s birthday, not realizing that superfine sugar and confectioner’s sugar are not the same thing. The first attempted produced scrambled chocolate eggs, which I didn’t even attempt to taste.
Also, I was at the cooking class, and burnt fries were no biggie since everything was so delicious!
You made a ice cream meatloaf log, and I made super gross soggy meatloaf. I didn’t have any bread crumbs and didn’t wanna drive the 2 miles to the grocery (I know) so I found a recipe using milk soaked sandwich bread instead. Just yuck! I had to cook it like an hour after if was done just to make it more dry and not gushing out the pan. I covered it in basically a whole bottle of ketchup and passed it off as sloppy joe loaf!
OMG, sloppy Joe loaf! I’m laughing out loud. Your super creativity just made my day.
Oh man….. 2014 was the year I decided EVERYTHING needed cinnamon. Pastas, cocktails, eggs…. you name it, I tried cinnamon! Turns out, I don’t think I really like cinnamon! Woopsies. Pasta with cinnamon=totally repulsive. DuH!
Trish
This was the year I ventured into gluten-free, coconut oil, sugar alternative baking. I cannot even… the results were things like gritty muffins and bready cookies. It was so sad. After awhile I gave up and went back to baking with AP flour, white sugar, and butter. Lots and lots of butter. And once again I had a happy kitchen!
Fun post, and thanks for sharing! We definitely all have these kitchen fails…and being pregnant while recipe-testing isn’t always ideal! :)
Have a Happy New Year!
Hahah I love this post! I used to get so upset when I’d have a recipe disaster but now I just laugh it off. I’ve messed up so. many. muffins. this year. Seriously so many. And had a lot of crappy mugcakes. I finally did get the mugcake down, but still no luck with muffins!
Happy New Year!
Honey Apple Cornbread was a bad one for me… it was SO GROSS. The idea sounded good but, gosh, it was nasty. And strawberry jam frosting totally didn’t work out at all. I had high hopes for that and I kept adding more stuff to try to save it, but it went from bad to worse. Yuck!
Sooooo excited for the nutella and bacon brownies, whenever those happen. YES! Merry Christmas to you and your family!!
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These are hilarious! I’ll never make chicken again without picturing herbs in *ahem* places. My big fails this year. First, I tried to adapt a chicken chili recipe for a picky friend who refuses to eat vegetables or tomato products. I also accidentally forgot the spices so I ended up with some bland chicken and 2 kinds of beans floating in chicken broth. Sad. Second, I tried a spaghetti squash casserole recipe that called for copious amounts of dried thyme as the only seasoning. I cooked a FOUR POUND spaghetti squash, took one bite, and discovered that I HATE dried thyme. Lastly, I made a carrot cake with a buttermilk glaze for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, I calculated things wrong and soaked the cake layers to the point that they fell straight through the cooling racks and I had to scrape them up off the counters, mound them into the shape of cake layers, and cover them with enough cream cheese frosting to choke a horse. Thank God for brothers who will eat almost anything.
Love this post – never fails to make me smile!!!
I look forward to this post every year because even as it makes me feel normal! Most of my bad recipes don’t even make it to photographing. My fails this year were full of baking fails…I am NO baker as I think I can pinch of this pinch of that but obviously that is wrong. It just stresses me out and makes me at my disaster!
Oh gosh – I can so relate. I am working on a similar post, the biggest fail actly came 2 days ago, a apple cranberry pie in a oatmeal cookie crust. The filling tasted great but the oatmeal cookie crust was a disaster – it was so bad. Hoping to try it with regular pie crust in future.
My biggest screw-up was just last night. I “invented” a party mix recipe consisting of rice chex, a whole bag of (expensive) pecan halves (because I love pecans), and mini pretzel crackers, all seasoned with onion and garlic powders and a little cayenne pepper and jazzed up with . . . bacon grease! Genius, right? I got it all mixed together and put it in the oven at 425 degrees to crisp up, but what I didn’t realize is that at that temperature, bacon grease burns fast. After 15 minutes in the oven, the entire pan of chex mix was black as coal. Waaah! Lesson learned. Back to the store! (Oh, and my plan when I make it again is to add a bag of popcorn after I take the chex mix out of the 275 degree oven after 15 minutes.)
Bacon wrapped brownies!? Oh man I really hope you figure that one out cause it sounds amazing. I love these posts every year and I always think to myself that I should save my photos of my failures but I am always so annoyed that I delete them or never take the pictures in the first place. Props to you.
I may be crazy, but that bacon, butternut squash, and egg on toast creation looked pretty dang delicious! The worst disasters I’ve had this year all involved cooking sugar on the stovetop. I need to stop getting distracted with cat pictures on the Internet, and pay attention to what’s going on with the candy thermometer. Thanks for sharing these, and I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday!
I love that you can admit to your mess ups, cuz lawd knows we all have them!! Just a couple weeks ago I misread my candy thermometer and burnt the holy heck out of a pot of toffee. Sticky, smokey MESS!!
While attempting to reduce apple cider to a syrup to make some apple cider caramels (Smitten Kitchen), I CARBONIZED the apple cider. WAY past burning. About half of a 4 quart pan full of fluffy carbon. Fluffy except for the parts stuck to the pan which took 2 full days and numerous times boiling the pan then scrubbing to get it off. If it hadn’t have been an All Clad pan, it would’ve been gone, gone, gone.
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who has recipe disasters!
I hope you figure out the vanilla spice cookies recipe; they look delicious!
You are a fabulous cook and funny beyond words! You coax a belly laugh out of me in every single post! Thank you. (Congratulations on your new adventures in “Mommyland.”)
Meatloaf ice cream log was my favorite..lol. We all make mistakes in the kitchen, but it makes us better bakers and cooks. Cheers to 2015!
My biggest disasters came on Dec 23 and 24th when I was making things to take to my host’s home for Christmas dinner. First I scorched (read burned) the onions for my Kick-Ass Cranberry Sauce. I was able to save it with copious quantities of cloves and allspice and some orange extract. Next I scorched (burned) the microwave peanut brittle that takes no talent whatsoever to make perfectly. Next, on Christmas eve I came across a recipe for slow cooker fudge. What could be easier? I made it, cooled it, cut it into squares, tasted it – and gagged. I couldn’t serve this to anyone. I put all the pieces in a bowl, found a jar of chocolate, cherry peanut butter in the pantry and put it in the bowl along with a fistful of coconut and two fistfuls of mini marshmallows and put the whole thing in the microwave for 2 min at 50% and then cooled it cut it and tasted it again. Fabulous. My host said, “you should sell this stuff.”. I could never duplicate it again in a million years. Did I mention the charred-beyond-recognition smashed potatoes? Let’s not even go there.
This is so amazingly funny, just love it! You really have such a talent for making people laugh and your recipes are always beautiful, even the disasters! Wishing you a happy new year!
I put a pat of butter into a *screaming* hot pan and it totally turned the bottom of the pan black and filled the WHOLE HOUSE with smoke for an hour!!!! Like, I had to take the cat outside. FAIL. *LOL!*
I LOVE this post every year!
This year I had an epic fail x4 with a giant chocolate chip gingerbread cookie…it literally crumbled all over the place. FOUR times. Yup, changed the whole recipe each time and zero luck. Oh well, there’s always next year :)
My worst failure this year was banana bread bread pudding. Sounds good, right? Well first off, I don’t even know what bread pudding is SUPPOSED to taste like. (I found out two days ago for a potluck Christmas dinner. I definitely got it wrong). It was AWFUL! I was frowning with every bite I took. Not good.
What a fantastic post and the photo descriptions and comments are classic! I can’t tell you how many fails I’ve made as well – props for photographing them. Thanks for sharing… I’m not alone :)
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Jessica, to say I’ve had disasters would be an understatement…I’m legally not permitted to make pie crust in every state of the union & pretty much gave up a long time ago…unless there’s anyone out there who prefer’s a thick bisket- like thick doughie like, yucky, no you didn’t…recently I even failed w/ a pre-made flipping rolled up one? What the what? I’m an awesome chef but there’s something about crust & me that just no can do…
In other failures, I’ve been morphing recipes for a dozen years now from nasty to more healthy with a great deal of success, until it’s not…OMG, I’ve literally slaved in the kitchen for hours, gotten out my tasting spoon & it’s really bad baby food! Then I’m tap dancing on the ceiling pulling out whatever “nasty” ingredient I can think of to make this “healthy” pasta sauce taste worthy of gourmet status at my table…it’s not pretty!
One of my holiday disaster’s was my mother’s fudge recipe, I had made it a zillion times & that Xmas I was home w/my eldest who had been through really serious surgery, so a coworker was stopping by to pick up my goodies for like 50 people…I take it out of the fridge & it’s.not set up…Oh holy night! I’m freaking out, there was no more time, so my girls & I rolled it into balls then into coconut, phew, it looked pretty & tasted great, you guys I swear this is what ya do if your fudge doesn’t set! Well, I’m sure I could go on & on, like “purple gravy”…but ya know, more another time!
I absolutely adore you Jessica, your amazing, congrats on your son & Happy New Year…
All of your photography is still absolutely stunning. Happy new year!
I made gluten-free gingerbread scones for Christmas brunch a few days ago. Sadly, my mom needed the oven at 350 for grits and breakfast casserole, so I hoped the lower temperature wouldn’t impact my scones…they flattened out into burned pancakes, though the flavor was pretty good!
We had a breakfast potluck at work and i was going to bring monkey bread. I had planned to make it the night before and heat it up before bringing it into work. My friend/coworker convinced me it would be better if served fresh out of the oven. Now, i like my sleep. I stay in bed until the absolute LAST possible minute to get ready and to work on time. So my plan was to put the dough together the night before, have my oven set to come on an hour before I usually wake up (my alarm set too, so I could pop it in the oven and then go back to sleep for an hour), and then let it cool for 15 minutes before dumping into a bowl and taking to work. Idea = great. Reality = terrible. Cooking in a pan right out of the fridge, even for an hour and a half, still resulted in completely raw dough. :( I was late to work AND I didn’t have anything to contribute.
Talk about baking disasters…This is the year that I tested many different recipes for holiday cookie trays. Both my husband and our dogs got tons of treats this year. I tried three different recipes for peanut butter blossoms and still failure. There was also a chocolate chip cookie recipe that made tons and tons of cookies that were like puffs of cardboard. So many dollars down the drain. One would think the ingrients sound so tasty why hasn’t anyone done them before. BECAUSE THEY ARE TERRIBLE TOGETHER. Happy Baking. Congrats on your baby boy. Fellow Pittsburgher…