What was your worst cooking or baking mistake you've made?

Question

Once I put Chili powder in an Apple Pie that I was baking for company for dinner!
They actually liked it tho; said it was very "tangy"!
How did your mistake turn out?
I 've made quite a few funny mistakes, but most of them resulting in just tossing it in the garbage!

Answer 1

I've made oh-so-many. I've placed myself on "Heat-producing appliance probation" more than once. I have joked that for years I thought the smoke alarm was the oven timer.

I'll tell you about my first turkey... making a sandwich about a week and a half later, my roommate found the giblets - paper and all. Thank goodness it was thoroughly cooked and I didn't kill us both.

Oh yeah... then there was the infamous "mashed potato incident." Suffice to say, I was cleaning mashed potatoes from the walls and ceiling for a couple of days. It's important, you know, to turn off the mixer BEFORE removing it from the bowl. Need I say more?

Thanks for the opportunity to share my shameful story anonymously.

Answer 2

Aside from the usual salt-instead-of-sugar error (tossed!), I once tried to make cookies but misread the recipe and only added about 1/3 of the flour! I couldn't imagine why it didn't thicken up! I ended up baking it like a cake and even so, it was a bit sad, though edible. Didn't find out my mistake till it was baked and someone else checked the cookbook.

Answer 3

I left the pineapple out of a pineapple upside down cake. Just after I put the batter over the brown sugar and butter, there they were in the measuring cup. So I scraped off the batter, which was not so bad because the butter made it come up from the sugar. And then I did it again! I must have been really spacey that day. So I scraped it up again and put the pineapples and cherries on that time. I once put salt instead of sugar in my coffee, that was a bit of a shock.

Answer 4

Many moons ago, back when dirt was young and I was a newlywed, I wanted to cook fried chicken for my new husband. I got it very nicely browned on the outside, but when we bit into it, it was raw and bloody inside. Yep, I'd had the burner too hot. I was able to halfway fix it though...I put it in the oven for about 20 minutes and finished cooking it. It was edible, but a bit soggy, not crispy like I wanted. And, meanwhile, the rest of the food got cold and that was before the days of microwaves.

My neighbor really goofed once. She wanted to make breaded pork chops and her recipe called for crushed corn flakes. She didn't have any, so she used FROSTED FLAKES! As you can imagine, the chops were inedible and there was no way to fix them. They were sweet through and through. I wonder why she didn't just use cracker crumbs or bread crumbs...

Answer 5

When I was about 8, I thought "from scratch" meant without a recipe. So I baked a cake without using a recipe, just tossing in what seemed to be the right amount of flour, sugar, eggs, etc. You can imagine how it turned out!

Answer 6

I was making a potato rostii once, and misread the recipe. I thought it said 1 tablespoon salt, but it was only 1 teaspoon. I slaved over those stupid potatoes for an hour--SO much work! When we sat down to dinner, I took one bite and spit it out. I love salt, but this was too salty for even me! The dish was otherwise beautiful though... That really burned me up. :(

Answer 7

My first hand at a simple recipe - baking cookies! I didn't realise that I put in too much baking powder - and the cookies ended up rock hard to eat!

Answer 8

LOL @ Kashi, too funny! :-)

I don't bake too often but one day I was learning to make my own gravy and instead of using a teaspoon of flour to thicken it, I grabbed the TABLEspoon.

Now this may not sound like a big deal. But imagine an OVERFLOWING pot of brown goo that took almost an hour to clean COMPLETELY up!

I'll never do that again!

Answer 9

This isnt really a baking mistake it is a kitchen mistake. I turned on the wrong burner and the one that I turned on started burning the burner cover. My boyfriend does not allow me in the kitchen anymore.

Answer 10

I once received this small envelope in the mail containing what I thought to have been spices from this new Portugese restaurant that opened close to our home. So I went inside, tried the recipe and added this "spice".... When we all ate, everything was very crunchy. Turned out it was sand in the envelope and not spices!!!!!