AIBU to ask for your baking disasters? Just butchered buttercream

[Aberforthsgoat]

been feeling crappy and thought I’d do some backing as I find it cathartic
Simple sponge with buttercream
Except the sponge burnt around the outside and despite following the recipe exactly and using a mixer, the buttercream icing had lumps of butter in it 😂
Turns out it wasn’t so cathartic after all

A bunch of us did a 1st birthday shoot for our babies and didn't want to spend a load of cash on sugar filled cakes so three of us baked giant cupcakes and iced them with cream cheese/maple syrup..... One problem was that none of our giant cupcakes turned out well at all!!

One was essentially raw in the middle, mine was hollow in the middle and the best of the bunch was massively burnt!!!!

I'm actually a decent Baker and still have no idea what went wrong!!

Giant cupcakes can be a bitch to get right.

Considering I can’t seem to manage standard cupcakes I’m not going to attempt the giant version 😂

Yesterday I baked my usual Victoria sponge recipe to take to a friend. It’s usually a good 6” deep and loved by everyone I make it for.
It sank.
I took a box of chocs instead.

How did you make the buttercream? By mixer or by hand?

You want the butter soft but not melting - cut into cubes and leave it on the side to get soft. Then whip the butter so it’s pale and creamy (high speed if using a mixer) then add the icing sugar very gradually and mix on a slow speed :)

I used to teach cake baking and decorating and I hate making buttercream - used to have to make kilos at a time and mixing it too quickly can make it really crappy.

There was a. Thread the other day about how they’ve changed what’s in icing sugar so it’s lumpier now

I spent years not mastering buttercream. Had to knock up a cake quickly one night last week whilst a bit pissed and had no butter so used countrylife instead. Best buttercream I've ever made.

I made a chocolate and coconut sponge a couple of weeks ago - this is normally one of my showstopper cakes. This one was horrendous! The sponge was ok but the buttercream was awful. It curdled and split and then leaked into the cake. Hubby ate one slice (out of politeness) and the rest went in the bin

Country life isn’t butter ? That’s news to me. Is it blended or something?
I made a Victoria sandwich once that was completely flat. No explanation and made cup cakes (well buns up north as we call them- same mix. All fine. Weird)

Isn't Countrylife butter?

I made eclairs once, did half on a buttered baking sheet, the other half I thought, ahah! And used my silicon baking sheet. 50% of eclairs rose, the other 50% flat as pancakes.

I've just bought a bread maker and made 3 loaves of bread today. All good. Apparently it makes cakes too so I might try those next. I don't think it can help with butter cream though.

I once slaved over a really nice fancy brownie that my son (about 7 or 8 at the time) had found online and asked me to bake.

We had a family friend over at the time and he had taken my son outside to play (I’m not sure who was the biggest kid).

This brownie recipe had about 100 steps and every so often my son would stick his head in an ask if they were done yet.
It took ages, but the taste test and smell along the way was great, so I didn’t mind.
It then took a lot longer to cook than I expected.

Just as my son and our friend walked in, I was fishing it out the oven and my son started to get really excited... when I dropped it, SPLAT on the floor.

It. Went. Everywhere!

I started to laugh, then my friend started to laugh, and my son looked furious, which just made us laugh harder. And harder. And harder. Only the more we laughed the crosser and more upset my son got that the precious brownie was half way cross the kitchen (clearly it still wasn’t even cooked to have splat so far). In the end we were laughing so hard we had to sit down and I was crying. It shouldn’t have been so funny, but my sons reaction was just hilarious.

It had forever been known as floor-brownie, and DS still hasn’t quite forgiven me I dont think!

DD’s 4th Birthday party, I promised her a snake shaped cake. Cake itself came out fine but I jut didn’t get the icing right, far too runny, soaked into the sponge and it was an overall disaster.

9pm the night before I started again, just to discover I ran out of sugar so begged our neighbour for more.

Since then I refuse to ice any cake. Buttercream maybe but it never looks smooth, I am all for a naked cake.

This weekend I tried making swiss meringue icing. Just made sugary scrambled egg whites.

Runny icing - did you use margarine instead of butter? I've made that mistake before.

I was trying to explain to a friend how to bake the (American) cornbread recipe of mine that she loved. Forgetting to ‘translate’ the US ingredients I told her “a cup of corn flour”, meaning what is sold here as maize meal or polenta. She went out and bough cornflour, and baked her flatmates a breezeblock.

When I was a teenager I decided to make fairy cakes whilst my parents were out and do a
ta-da on their return. Only it didn't go to plan. The mixing and putting in cake cases went well however I couldn't get the oven to work. In a panic for having a bollocking for "potching" again I lit the grill to cook them. The tops were black, the underneath was liquid cake mix. On my parents return my DM said she had set the oven on timed so it would be pre-heated when they came back from food shopping.

A friend, again when a teenager made a Swiss roll but forgot to add flour. She basically made a sweet frittata.

For some reason today the buttercream lifted the tops off my fairy cakes so ended up a crumby mess. Cakes quite heavy too. I used to be a good baker. Not sure what's happened.

I've had several baking disasters (and so has DH).
One time I was making a shepherd's pie for a party, and as I left the house I dropped it, all over the driveway. Utter disappointment :(
Another time, hubby was a bit pissed and decided he was craving ginger nut biscuits.
So he started making gingernut biscuits, which smelled heavenly, except he accidentally poured a whole lot of nutmeg into the mix, and then thought it would be a good idea to halve the sugar in the recipe, and make 1 big biscuit rather than a few small ones.
We tried the biscuit, and immediately spat it out.
Nutmeg is not great as a main flavour. Nutmeg should only be added sparingly.
And if you're going to make biscuits, for the love of god just go unhealthy and use the right amount of sugar.

Does anyone remember the episode of celebrity bake off when Martin Kemp accidentally baked his buttercream instead of his fairy cake mix?

To clarify it was the 'spreadable ' countrylife!

I once made buttercream with lard... I opened a professional celebration cake business once I learned how to make buttercream ....

I ruined a Victoria sponge on Friday. I'd put it all in one tin as I didn't have two tins the same size. I often do this and just slice it in half. I knew it would take longer to cook this way but checked it after twenty minutes anyway.
Obviously it was still wobbling but looked good.
Wandered off intending to give it another 10 minutes but no, 40 minutes later I remembered and ran to the kitchen to extract a charred cement disc from the oven.

So I tried to salvage something (as I'd already made buttercream) and took the middle out to make cake pops.
I bloody split the chocolate when I was melting it too so the cake pops were also abandoned.
All in the bin. What a waste.

CountryLife isn't butter?!?!?

You'll be telling us you thought Elmlea is cream next.

Pizza dough. Used my usual recipe, left it to prove but when I went back to it, it looked like it had reduced instead of increased. Left it a little longer, came back and it was batter.

I made another batch with the exact same recipe and it came out fine, so I've no idea what happened.