Mistakes & Mishaps

Our baking doesn't always go smoothly, but I've learned that a lot of problems can be fixed and it all usually turns out okay in the end.

After we tried the s'mores blondies, which had the graham cracker mixed into the batter, that I talked about in my last post, our next s'mores bars had a graham cracker crust, a chocolate layer and a marshmallow top.

Now I could just tell you that they were delicious and post a picture...

BUT that wouldn't exactly be the entire story.

My mom has always talked to me about how pictures on the internet and in magazines can be fake and not show how things really are. Making these bars made me see what she means. Because the pictures above are real, but they make it seem like everything was perfect and it wasn't!

See what I mean?!!!!!

These bars caught fire in the oven!!!!!! I missed it, but my brother said that the oven was filled with flames. My mom just turned the oven off and left it closed, because fire needs oxygen to burn, and so in a closed space it burned itself out. We were actually able to peel off the top burned layer though, and there was perfect soft gooey marshmallow underneath.

Our sink was kind of a mess though!

But when we went to cut them, we had ANOTHER problem.

The graham cracker crust completely fell apart.

We thought that there were too many graham cracker crumbs and not enough butter in this crust while we were making it and we were right! But despite the MANY problems with this recipe, the bars were fantastic and we'd definitely make them again. We liked this recipe better than the s'mores blondies. But next time I'd just use a different crust. And I'd tell my mom not to set it on fire!

Fortunately, this was our only fire. But we have had some other burning incidents...

A fantastic breakfast item that we made one day was a strawberry almond cornmeal cake. First we made a batter and added a layer of fresh strawberries.

Then we made a crumble that we sprinkled on top.

I love how pink the crumble looked! It got its color from grinding freeze dried strawberries into a dust. You need to have a LOT of freeze dried strawberries though, because an entire bag is only about an ounce. We didn't have enough, but the crumble was still amazing.

It loses its pink color when you cook it though, which is kind of a bummer.

And this is what it looked like sliced.

But when we cut it, we realized that the bottom looked like this!

We followed the directions exactly, so we have no idea why it burned.

But we just cut off the burned bottom and it was as good as new!

I was so happy that we were able to fix it because it would have been so sad if the whole cake was ruined. We all loved it and I highly highly recommend!!

Another recipe where we ran into a burning issue was salted caramel pretzel blondies. I really wanted to have a salted caramel dessert, and so I begged my mom to make this one. Unfortunately, we were trying to glaze a lemon cake (more on that in a future post!) and make our caramel at the same time.

That turned out to be a big mistake because our caramel ended up like this!

Unfortunately, this was not a mistake that we could ignore. So we just made the caramel a second time, and it turned out much better.

This is what it looked like when we poured it out to cool.

But then I think that maybe we left it in the freezer for too long, because we were supposed to cut it into squares after, but it was too hard.

So we just broke it into pieces with our fingers and that worked fine!

This is what the dough looked like.

And this is what the blondies looked like cooked. Although we accidentally cut them down the middle before we remembered to take a picture!!

My dad said that these were one of the very best things that we've made in quarantine. He loves salted caramel. And I loooooooved these too!! They were sweet and salty and gooey and crunchy. So I guess it was definitely worth having to make the caramel twice!

We've also had a bunch of problems with accidentally putting in too much or too little of an ingredient. Many times, a recipe calls for room temperature butter, so my mom pulls it out of the fridge a few hours before we start baking. But that has gotten us into trouble sometimes. We made a funfetti cookie cake, and my mom pulled out butter for both the cake and the frosting. But then when we were baking, she just had me put in all the butter that was on the counter. Whoops! Half of the butter was supposed to be for the frosting, so we accidentally doubled it!!! We were really worried about how our cake would turn out, but it was still delicious.

This was me and my sister putting on sprinkles.

And voila - this was our finished cake!

It turned out that the extra butter didn't cause a problem.

But then, we made the exact same mistake again with peanut butter chocolate chip cookies!!! The recipe calls for a 1/2 cup of butter, which is one stick. But somehow my mom was thinking that 1/4 cup was one stick and so she put in two! We realized that we had done something wrong when the dough was too soft to roll into balls, like we were supposed to. We thought that for sure the cookies were going to be greasy and not good, but they were actually great! So we did an experiment, and made the cookies a second time the right way.

This time we were able to roll them into balls and then smush them with a fork the way that we were supposed to.

And this is how they turned out.

But we all liked the extra butter version more!! I think it's interesting that we liked the wrong way better. They tasted a lot like some of the famous bakery cookies I've had. I guess that bakeries just use tons of butter!! We used these cookies to make s'mores one night and that was really good. I highly recommend cookie s'mores!!

We had a different problem with too much of an ingredient when we made fudge ripple monster cookie bars. These were amazing! They had a peanut butter oatmeal bar base, then a layer of chocolate fudge, then more peanut butter oatmeal bar with m&m's mixed in on top. But when my mom was making the fudge layer, she realized that she added in too much sweetened condensed milk. The recipe calls for 7oz, which is only half a can, but we dumped in the entire thing. So we just doubled everything else too, and ended up with double the fudge, but at least it was made properly. And when is too much fudge ever really a problem?!!! We only used half of it in the recipe and then kept the extra and used it to make monster bars again on a busy day when we didn't have a lot of time for baking!

This is how they turned out.

You can see the fudge layer in the middle!

Then we had the opposite problem when we made caramel pretzel bites. We forgot to add the vanilla to our caramel. These still turned out to be completely delicious. But I bet they'll taste even better next time, when we remember the vanilla! Even though we messed it up, this recipe is still at the tippy top of my quarantine baking list!!!

These were so good, that I think that we're going to give them out around the holidays!

I've learned that even when you make a mistake in the middle of a recipe, you can always either fix it or at least just start over. I think this is a really good lesson to learn, and not just for baking. Everybody makes mistakes all the time and that's how we learn and get better!!