How to make dwarf bread

[rachelmanija]

I figured out why my cornmeal cake turned into a blunt instrument. I glanced at the recipe and apparently noted the proportions but misread the amounts of the two types of flour, so instead of using one cup of flour and half a cup of cornmeal, I used two cups of flour and one cup of cornmeal. Oops.

Definitely worse than Yoon's apple crumble disaster, in which she forgot to put in the sugar in the crumble topping, but I salvaged it, or at least made it edible, by adding more sugar and butter and putting it back in the oven. The cornmeal cannonball had to be flung into the dumpster, where it landed with an echoing boom.

Tell me about your worst cooking disasters.

Comments

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

The three most repeated family cooking disaster stories all involve 'and you should really not mistake this ingredient for that ingredient'.

First - Vanilla extra and soysauce may look the same, but are not. And you will unhappy if you attempt to use vanilla in your stir fry. More so because it will ruin in the seasoning on your wok. Apparently it /never comes out/ of the seasoning and thus anything else cooked in the wok for the rest of time will end up smelling like vanilla, at least until you either throw the wok out or spend the hours scrubbing off the seasoning to get it down to plain metal and then spend the time to re-season it.

Second - anise seeds and cumin seeds, again, may look very similar, but chili made with anise seeds is inedible no matter how much you can't stand to waste it because that really was your food budget for several days of the week.

Third - Cumin and Cinnamon may share several letters and set sitting next to each other in the spice cabinet. They can not be substituted and cumin flavored horchata is not a good idea. (Fortunately, we realized what we'd done and managed to skim almost all of it off, so there was only a tiny bit of slightly odd flavor.)

Other cooking life lessons I or friends have learned over the years - baking powder and baking soda, they are not the same and can not be substituted for each other. Leeks which are still slightly damp and thrown into too hot oil may explode... this may set your celing on fire. No, really, do not go away from the toasting nuts, they /will/ burn the second you're not paying attention.