Peanut Butter Chocolate Awful

Trying to rush a cake, never a good idea:

At least it tasted good.

Updates and Disasters

When I make a pie, there are often lots of pie crust scraps left over. My mom always used to take these, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar, and then bake them up. Quite tasty. I recently made a pie (it turned out great, forunately) and I decided to bake up the pie crust scraps "just like mom used to make them".

Except that I forgot about them in the oven.

FAIL. I think my mom had to throw away the baking sheet!

HELLO

Hey anyone who still reads this! butisuckatcooking.com no longer exists. If you ever have a suck story to tell, you will now need to go to butisuckatcooking.blogspot.com

Oh, and a little while ago I left the oven on for half the day.

Powdered Sugar

This isn't so much of a cooking disaster, but more of a long term fail on my part. The problem is powdered sugar. Specifically, I have this mental dysfunction such that whenever I walk into a grocery store, I suddenly find myself thinking "Hmm... I think we are out of powdered sugar. I better get some more."

Never mind the fact that I had that same thought last week and we have plenty of powdered sugar as result. This process continues until we have 3-4 pounds of the stuff stock-piled in the pantry and Amy is threatening to start sifting the stuff into my laptop if I don't stop.

And the thing is, I hardly ever use powdered sugar in the first place. It's not like flour and regular sugar, where I can reliably go through a bag in a couple weeks. I use powdered sugar a couple of times in a YEAR.

I don't know if there is a cure for this disease. But if you need to borrow some powdered sugar, let me know.

Roasted Brussel Sprouts

When removing a pan of brussel sprouts from the oven, do not accidentally grab the rack and tilt backwards. If you do so, the pan of brussel sprouts will slide towards the back of the oven and flip over. If you're lucky (like me), a few delicious, roasted brussel sprouts will remain in the pan for future consumption.

Ironically, this happened about 2 minutes after I told Tommy how his awesome wife had made an awesome dinner. Roasted brussel sprouts -- fail (although the ones we were able to eat were excellent). Corn bread muffins -- pass. BBQ ribs -- pass.

Doomed Macaroons

After a few weeks of sustaining ourselves on sugary cookies and large amounts of alcohol, we decided to institute a "health week" of sorts. I've was searching on the internet for creative recipes that are still healthy when I came across this one for Coconut Macaroons that seemed pretty straight forward and sans all the fatty (read: delicious) ingredients. It also only made four macaroons - so snacking on the remainder of a two dozen batch for the next week wouldn't be an option. And, of course, in the picture they were quite attractive.

My Mistakes, in Order:
1. Thinking that a tasty AND healthy version of macaroons exists
2. Not greasing the pan
3. Obviously something went WAY wrong with the chocolate drizzle. Im guessing we need to use the double boiler method instead of the microwave method.
4. Serving these ugly little wads of coconut and chocolate anyway. Even with only four in the recipe, we still had leftovers - and they went in the trash!

Caramel

It's been a while since anyone has sucked at cooking, but as we find ourselves in the middle of the holiday season, opportunities abound for kitchen disaster. I am no exception.

I made a ton of food for Thanksgiving (four types of gravy!) and most of it turned out just fine. Except for the Cranberry Pecan Tart.

Usually I am a pie man, but I figured I'd try to broaden my horizons this year beyond the standard Karo syrup pecan pie recipe (classic though it may be). I found a recipe for a Cranberry Pecan Tart in an old issue of Cooks Illustrated, so I decided to give it a shot. The recipe requires you to caramelize some sugar. I remember making caramel corn all by myself back in middle school, so I figured how hard could it be?

Hard. Solid, crysalized-sugar stalagmites hard, to be specific. Caramel fail.

In fact, it took me three tries to make this recipe. On the first shot, I wasn't really paying attention and the next thing I know my pan of slow bubbling caramel sugar had turned into concrete-hard crystalized sugar rock candy. That was on Thanksgiving day and seeing as how I was running late and already had enough food to feed a small army, I vowed to try another day.

On the second shot, I did a little better, but I still had crystalized sugar problems:




On the third shot, I was extra careful and got the desired result:



It remains to be seen if the finished product actually tastes good, as it's still in the oven. However, I can offer the following advice:

• It's a good idea to stir your water and sugar together pretty well before you start, but also be sure wipe any stray sugar crystals down from the sides of the pot.


• Apply lots of heat to your best pan to make sure the sugar cooks hot and evenly.


• Do not stir at all until your sugar reaches 300º / light golden color. Even then, only gently swishing of the pot is advised, no actual stiring.


• When you are boiling the sugar, if you can see lots of sugar crystals forming on the top of the bubbles of the boiling water, you have already failed.