I love to bake in my free time.
It’s a hobby I picked up while I was in school. Whenever I didn’t want to work on an assignment or essay, I would bake something. It’s affectionately known in student circles as “procrastibaking.” That is, the act of baking to procrastinate from the things you should actually be doing.
So a hobby was born. I had always baked at home with my mom (especially around Christmas - I’ve written about that before), but it really took on a life of its own when I had a kitchen of my own and very real responsibilities to avoid.
I’ve gotten better over the years, tackling increasingly complicated recipes requiring special equipment. There have been some major wins. For Canada Day one year, I made a sky-high red velvet cake so fluffy it melted on the tongue. Recently, I made a beautiful cranberry curd tart. It sounds weird, but I promise it was both photogenic (a vibrant pink hued custard-like filling) and so tasty.
But every now and again, I come back to a baking fail. A recipe I messed up so spectacularly that there is no return, no saving it. It’s Christmastime, which means baking, which means a lot of past #bakingfails.
Last week, I dropped an entire tray of fresh out of the oven cookies. They ended up all over my floor, sure, but also inside the oven, in the drawer under the oven, and, of course, all over me. The tray was toast - but hey, the crumbles were delicious.
Once, a few years ago, I set out to bake cranberry bliss bars, a favourite snack from Starbucks. The internet is littered with recipes for the famous cake/shortbread hybrid. It’s not an overly complicated or ambitious recipe - that is, not when you read the recipe correctly.
I was making the treat as my contribution to a household Christmas dinner my roommates and I were hosting. My more-experienced cook of a roommate was taking care of the main bird (we opted for chicken), others took the salad and snacks, and I, being the baker among us, was designated dessert.
Everything was going just fine! The batter was easy to whip up, the oven preheated, and in it went. Half an hour later I was greeted with…disaster.
It seems I had confused cups of butter with sticks of butter. Two sticks of butter is one cup. Two cups of butter is four sticks. I was supposed to have added two sticks, I added two cups, and the long and short of it is, there was half an inch of melted butter bubbling away on the top of my bliss bars.
I bought a pie instead.
There have been others, of course: the banana bread that refused to set after I threw in an extra half a banana (no point wasting it right?); the lemon poppy seed bread that took on an olive-y flavour and a slightly bizarre colour when I used extra virgin olive oil instead of straight vegetable oil by mistake. Weird, but not as gross as you’d think.
These days, I’m a lot more careful when I bake. I read the recipe, read it again; pull out all the ingredients before I begin mixing, and read the recipe a third time.
Then and only then do I cautiously offer the baked goods to my audience.
What baking fails are you hoping to skip this Christmas season? Any particularly catastrophic failures you’d like to share and/or forget?