Today, Lauren from Celiac Teen posted about some of her recent kitchen flops and I thought that I would follow suit. I’d like to pretend that I have a perfect record when it comes to kitchen successes, but that’s far from the truth.
I’ve had a quite a few flops before. The first two were in food classes in grade school with wheat flour – I once made green, playdough tasting hard-as-a-rock blueberry muffins and another time tried to make cupcakes that didn’t have enough flour and ended up being a caved in mess with some weird lace-like structure. Yummy. It’s safe to say that I didn’t receive a decent grade on either attempts.
With my somewhat selective memory (ahem :P) I have forgotten most of my gluten-free flops and/or someone in my family was willing to eat them. The ones I can remember best are all having to do with icings. I know that I probably should have thrown each icing out and started over, but I have this stubborn streak that urges me to try to fix things instead of giving up.
First, I tried to make a meringue buttercream icing, but I didn’t let the sugar/egg mixture cool enough before adding the fat and used margarine instead of butter. This resulted in a very margarine tasting (olive oil margarine nonetheless) icing that had a layer of oil underneath. Yuck. I still iced a cake with it but thinking back on it, that’s just gross.
The second is when I tried to make this coconut cream icing from Elana’s Pantry. I ran out of agave nectar part way and used honey instead. You’re supposed to freeze it for a while and then whip it up. Mine would not solidify and stayed sludgy despite how long I froze it and would not whip up. Whoops!
The third is when I decided to use light cream cheese instead of regular in a cream cheese icing. I didn’t soften it enough and it was having little cream cheese clumpies that wouldn’t beat out. I thought that well, if I soften it a bit, then it should work. I couldn’t stick it in the microwave given that it was in a metal bowl, so I decided to stick it in the oven for a few minutes. Stupid idea. The chunkies did soften up or melt, but the icing would not thicken despite sticking almost a kilogram (2 lbs) of icing sugar in it. It thickened up a bit, so I poured it over the cake I had made and had to wipe the edges of the plate as it slowly flowed off the plate before it was eaten.
There’s also the time that I made these sugar cookies and decided that I should use olive oil instead of melted butter. Not recommended.
Have you had any kitchen flops? What happened?
Without Adornment 