I'm such an idiot aka tell me your baking fails

[QuestionableMouse]

Sister asked if I'd bake her a corned beef and onion pie. (Their oven is currently sitting in their garage due to a kitchen remodel)

My first mistake was saying yes in this heat 😂😂😂😩😩😩

Clearing down, pies baking in the oven. All. Good until. I moved the flour container and found the bastard onion. I totally forgot about it 😂😂😂😩😩😩

Oops. I'm sure it'll still taste good but it's a pretty key ingredient in a corned beef and onion pie 😂😂😂

and I won't mention the time I made lemon curd only to discover the lemon juice still sitting in the jug on the side. No wonder the damn stuff tasted mostly of egg

I made five Christmas puddings once without putting the breadcrumbs in. I though they were a bit wet but didn’t ponder on it. They’d been in the Bain Marie in the oven for half an hour before I twigged. Out they came, breadcrumbs added, and back in they went for another five hours!

@Itwasntme101

OP what proportion of corned beef/potato/onion do you use? I want to try and make some like my mums and I think I've found the pastry recipe she used but don't know how much of the other ingredients to try. And those that use plates for them is there a specific type of plate to use or avoid?

Not sure I'm much help here - I used a full tin of corned beef and about eight or nine smallish potatoes to make two pies. It should be pink. 😂

I used disposable pie dishes today but usually use glass ones. (My nana owned them, and she taught me to bake pies.)

This isn't me, but my DM. She made a delicious apple crumble with butter, cinnamon and an unlabelled bag from her freezer. Cue potato crumble with custard. I can't believe she couldn't smell them roasting gently in the oven!

That's perfect actually, my mum never seemed to measure anything out so a description of how it should look is probably more helpful 😂

Cakes, biscuits, pastry fine. But anything with yeast always fails. I can’t get it to work.

I have made 200+ loaves in our bread machine. Last weekend I forgot to put any water in with the flour, yeast, etc. I told my DH the machine must have 'malfunctioned'.

Before I knew him (thankfully) DH once made pasta with chicken in a creamy mustard sauce.

With English mustard instead of wholegrain.

And measured in tablespoons instead of teaspoons.

He doesn't cook any more.

When I was a teenager I wanted to impress my parents who had gone out shopping by making fairy cakes. I'd mixed up the ingredients but I couldn't get the oven to switch on. In a panic I decided to cook them under the grill. The tops went black and the underneath liquid cake mix.

My parents came home to ruined cakes and me sobbing. What I didn't know was my DM had put the oven on timed for some reason and it wouldn't come on until then.

On telling my friend a few days later about trying to cook cakes under the grill she interrupted and eagerly asked "did it work?" She was crestfallen when I said it didn't. This being asked by the same friend who made swiss roll but forgot to add the flour so ended up with a sugary baked omelette.

Bought some really lovely scales for kitchen, made a shepherds pie but read measurements completely wrong. Not enough spuds. The end result was not pretty but we bloody ate it anyway.

I'm a pretty good baker, but I have had my fair share of disasters.

The most memorable was the chocolate fudge cake. It had been in the oven for the set time, it had risen evenly and it looked cooked. My bakers instinct said it needed longer, but I tested it with a skewer and it came out clean.
The skewer lied. When the cake had cooled I released the spring clip on the tin and flooded the worktop with sticky brown gunge. Was a right faff to clean up.
I don't rely on a skewer. It's actually more accurate to listen to the cake. Noisy cakes aren't cooked.

I moved overseas, where there isn't self raisinf flour

every bloody week I'd bake smoethign and forget to put the baking powder in.

It wasn't so bad with receipes (although all my recipes now have BAKING POWDER scribbled all over them. )
It was worse with the things I bake from memory, ie all basic and simple fairy cakes etc

When I was a LOT younger I decided to make myself some ready break for breakfast, never made it before so I read the instructions which said to put it in the microwave for 1 1/2 minutes (one and a half) but I read it as 11/2 (eleven to twelve) 😂🙄
It took me about 5 minutes of wondering why it kept bubbling over the side of the bowl before I realised what I'd done..
Honestly I've got a lot more common sense now.

I once tried to make nigellas pineapple upside down cake. She said DON'T use a tin with a loose base (the juice would leak) or a silicon baking "tin" (I guess thinking it might affect the cooking of the pineapple at the bottom), unfortunately these are all I have.

So me being a genius, I thought I'll put the metal base from the loose bottomed tin into the silicon dish, so it'll taste normal but won't leak .. I didn't think but of course that created an extra thick layer of insulation at the bottom where the pineapple was...So it looked cooked but when I turned it out there was just a soggy mess of pineapple and raw egg

I baked some deliciously light and soft rock cakes in school once. The recipe said 1 a pinch of salt but in my stupidity I put 1tbsp in. They were awful.

Not me but DH once made chicken and spinach curry and forgot the spinach. He then did exactly the same thing the next time he made it. (And yes he does like spinach so it wasn't deliberate.)

Last time I did sprouts I burnt them so badly we had to throw away the frying pan. I was frying sprouts coated in Marmite and garlic oil in butter but I forgot the butter. I also went to the loo and forgot about the sprouts until I went in the kitchen for something and it was filled with acrid black smoke. The stench of burnt sprouts lasted for days! I haven't cooked any since!

I baked a chocolate traybake that I’d made 100’s of times before but put a pinch of ground white pepper in it instead of a pinch of salt. Chocolate and pepper cake is disgusting and only fit for the bin

I was maki sausage rolls and the recipe said add 10ml of water. I struggle with numbers and read 100ml of water it was the most disgusting looking pile of meaty slop. My DH sieved a lot of water out and cooked them into some weird meatballs to make me feel better. I've never attempted them again

Mine is very embarassing but here goes. I ran out of caster sugar and payday was a couple days away (finances were very bad in those days). I had a neighbour coming round and wanted to make her fairy cakes. I put granulated sugar in them. They wouldn't rise and just sank or burned into a sugar crisp. major fail!

@Bearlyclearly

I baked a chocolate traybake that I’d made 100’s of times before but put a pinch of ground white pepper in it instead of a pinch of salt. Chocolate and pepper cake is disgusting and only fit for the bin

Now if that had been chilli pepper flakes that could have been lovely

Not me but ex....

Made cheesecake and used the onion and chive cream cheese. He didnt notice until he took a big bite

This is completely outing because I have told everyone in real life this story but at the beginning of lockdown I got 2 pots of cheese sauce out of the freezer to make some macaroni cheese. Defrosted them made the mac and cheese and served it up. I was the last to start eating and everyone was happily eating their dinner. I tucked in and it tasted a bit off, sweet even. It then dawned on me I had used one pot of cheese sauce and one pot of custard!! Everyone ate it all except me, I was too busy laughing!! I wouldn't recommend macaroni custard

@onlyherefortheguineapigs I never use caster sugar!

Melting chocolate and butter in the microwave in a Pyrex bowl, which we’d placed on top of fridge freezer to save space. Went to life bowl down, somehow tipped the whole thing over my head! Thankfully it was only like warm as I’d left it to cool a bit, but I felt like a total tit!

@onlyherefortheguineapigs

Mine is very embarassing but here goes. I ran out of caster sugar and payday was a couple days away (finances were very bad in those days). I had a neighbour coming round and wanted to make her fairy cakes. I put granulated sugar in them. They wouldn't rise and just sank or burned into a sugar crisp. major fail!

I quite often use granulated sugar for baking and it works fine.

These are making me feel better about my forgetfulness! 😂😂