G’DAY FRIENDS. So, how’s life?
I’ve mentioned earlier that our internet lives are a shining beacon of filtered success. It’s no new revelation, a plethora of articles have already been written on the subject. Take a look at anybody’s instagram account and you’ll generally find only #cool and #kooky happenings of their lives. We don’t mention the unglamorous details of events gone wrong, straight up feels of downright sadness (that is, too sad to throw a romanticised spin on it), friendships gone bust or general upsetting happenings. It’s the internet! And our natural instinct is to only share what’s great. Look how successful I am! Look at my great hair today! TODAY I MET THIS AMAZING DOG. We literally live our lives frolicking in Valencia (the instagram filter, not the city). Not hatin’, just sayin’. It’s only natural in this day and age.
The very same sentiments mirror onto our blogs. Generally we only share our successes rather than our (cake) fails. There’s a beautiful art in the ol’ salavge mission so I want to hear your stories.
I was baking a baseless cheesecake in a Profiline PushPan for the sake of this post (The Cheeseboard Cheesecake aka The G.O.A.T.) however I managed to overbake the poor thing. Salvage mission 101: scorch the surface for DRF (dat rustic feel™) poach some quince with peppercorns and bayleaves, soak that badboy in the poaching juices and serve it up. CAKE (mostly) SAVED.
To pay tribute to my humble cake save I’m running a little competition. Tell me about your best cooking salvage mission. Did you cover an ugly cake with stuff? Did you transform your crumbled concoction into a trifle? Your story doesn’t need to be baking related; tell me all about it to be in the running to win a Profiline PushPan baking pack worth over $170. The lucky winner will receive 4x 12cm PushPans, 2x 20cm PushPans and 1x 26cm PushPan. Sound good? Good! Get entering by posting your tale in a comment on this post. Mark off your activities on the widget below because extra votes are awarded if you like alanabread on Facebook or have a little tweet. Cast aside your internet egos. I want to feel your pain. I want to know your inner food MacGyver. It can be as detailed or as short as you like, both essays and short sentences welcome. Good luck!
Tags: cheesecake, profiline pushpan, quince
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The first banana cake I ever made was a total disaster. It didn’t rise at all and was so dense that it was inedible. I was about to bin it but I remembered a trick my mother used. I sliced it into 1cm thick slices, laid the slices on a paper lined oven tray and slowly baked for about 40 minutes. Best darn dunkin’ bickies ever!!!!
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Once I attempted to make a “thank you” sponge cake for a group of nurses but sadly my sponge was not light and fluffy. In fact, my sponge was pitch black and completely burnt (baking+gardening=no no). Lucky Coles make a nice basic sponge. Made my own jam, wiped some cream and filled the cakes myself. Also told the nurses I cooked everything from scratch (just a little white lie)
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You are spot on Alana. Only the happy things make it onto published pages. Such a skewed representation of liife.
Funny you mention trifle. I once tried to make a chocolate mousse for a dinner party. The thing was so dense and airless it was more like a choc cream. So u went and got a $2 sponge cake from aldi and some berries and turned the thing into a choc berry trifle. Must have gotten away with it as our dinner guests were super impressed:-) -
My first Genoise was a disaster. It never rose well, whatever rose collapsed later like a deflated balloon. The husband returned from work, looked at this rubbery yellowish disc and gave that ‘Is that a cake?’ look. I sliced the so called Genoise into wedges. Toasted in the oven for a few mins, cooled, blitzed in the blender, put in a ziplock and stored away. I didn’t have the heart to throw away my hard work though it didn’t appear to be one. I was upset and read over dozen Genoise recipes, tips, tricks and then gained the confidence to try again. I did and it was a success. After few days I made cake crumb cookies with the stored Genoise crumbs. Lesson learned – Patience is the key. And perseverance pays.
Thanks for hosting the giveaway. Happy Baking!
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I was once making a tiramisu for christmas for the family. Got half way through making it and realised I had absolutely NO coffee in the house. Being christmas, there was NOWHERE to get any and I’d promised the family I’d make my famous tiramisu. So I was on a mission to turn my sponge fingers, chocolate, marscapone etc into a tiramisu without coffee… I went around to all my neighbours to get some and no one was home. I didn’t even have a scrap of nescafe 43 in the house. Anyway, after a few hours of rummaging, I managed to get my hands on some Kahlua. So, Kahlua in hand my ‘tiramisu’ was made and was bound to get some christmas spirits flowing. It ended up being such a hit that we now make it EVERY christmas with Kahlua and is a family favourite. Nothing like improvisation!
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One time Tiffany was cooking dumplings in a pan with hot oil and she poured some water into the pan then there was a big fire in the pan so I grabbed the pan and ran round in circles til it went out.
Now we don’t eat dumplings.
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More often than not I do think only the good things go online. No one wants to be the cause of any issues (refering back to your previous how not to be a jerk when blogging), well at least most don’t want to be. You will get the handful of people who just have to be difficult. Anyways, I don’t recipe share all that much (which I should get into) but not afraid to post photos on instagram of failures. My cake explosion still got positive feedback, funnily enough.
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Hahhaha egos shmeegos I felt the same when I did giveaway last time but stuff that. It’s not like you’re giving away a shampoo or anything. Anyone that reads your blog would really want that push pan, including me! I shared a blog post on my horror story in making my green tea cheesecake once for a party. First, causing a huge mess all over the kitchen from just the crumbing process (how noob can I be). Then, completely misreading the recipe and mistaking the teaspoon for TABLESPOON (how bloody noob can I be) and resulted in a good and bad thing. Good: the matcha flavour was much more obvious and was crazy tasty! Bad: it was stiff as from being overladen with gelatin. I saved my ass by doing two things. First, I told everyone at the party that that batch was green tea biscuits instead of cheesecake (and everyone believed me and loved it). Then, I also made a separate batch with the correct amount of gelatin and awesomely “mistaken” amount of green tea. Everyone loved it too. Moral of the story: everyone will believe anything you say as long as cheesecake is involved.
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Ha, I have had many baking disasters especially in the realm of macarons!!! For Valentines Day this year I was sick and stuck at home all sniffly and thought I would raise my spirits by making italian macarons in little red heart shapes in celebration (or lamentation) of being sadly single on the most loved-up day of the year. I suspect I under mixed the batter and the oven was too hot as I had 6 trays of cracked, lumpy, extremely ugly macarons which did not warm my heart one bit! Half were smushed up and eaten sprinkled over ice cream with strawberries, and the rest were a Valentines Day present to the rubbish bin!
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Love this!! When I was baking my goddaughter’s cake I put a raspberry filling in the center. I used frozen raspberries because they weren’t yet in season and were too expensive. Welp, the raspberry juice kept running out of the cake and was just an absolute mess. I made another layer and flipped the original top layer on the new one. I used raspberry jam instead. But as it turns out the lemon cake soaked with raspberry juice was so dang good we ate it for breakfast dessert and whenever we could at my house :)
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i have been baking for a few years and started doing cake orders for friends, i was asked to make a cake for a friend’s graduation but everything went wrong that evening, from curdled custard, leaking tin, deflated gluggy cake! nothing worked! i ended up turning all those failed bits into a “trifle” like dessert and ate it for dessert 3 days straight. it was delicious, just not too pretty to look at!
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Recipe For Disaster
Serves: Dinner party for five friends
Prep time: All afternoon
Ingredients: pulled pork sliders, enchiladas, Southern-style chicken wings, macarons. Optional: maple bacon.
Method:
Step 1. Overmix macaron meringue.
Step 2. Undermix second batch of meringue.
Step 3. Burn half a tray of deflated and cracked macrons.
Step 4. Check the clock- 15mins till guests arrive.
Step 5. Freak out.
Step 6. Freak out again.
Step 7. Suffer a stroke of genius and mix crushed failed salted caramel macarons with frozen yoghurt, swirl with dulce de leche and serve with warm dark chocolate ganache and microwave popcorn.
Step 8. Bask in glory. -
This looks really good! I wish I could find some quinces around where I live :/ maybe I’ll sub for another fruit! Great job once again, Alanabread!
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So for my baking fails…
I attempted to make macarons using a Jacque Torres recipe, calling for almond paste instead of almond flour. So I spent all day making the almond paste and macaron batter (and a mess), but because I had to rearrange the proportions to get the right consistency, they were too heavy. I passed them off as really good cookies :D
I bought a plastic truffle mold but when I used it I couldn’t get the truffles out and made a giant mess of chocolate and blueberry cream cheese filling. Chocolate was all over my arms, the mold, the counter…and as I was making these, my mom came home to this chaos and continuously chewed me out. I had leave the kitchen and finish the truffles later after cleaning because her comments were too much to take…Oh, and I broke the mold.
I burnt cream puffs, even though I could make them with my eyes closed. The person who ordered them had to wait until I sold them next week.
I was trying to make a large volume of egg white-only cakes for my friends in a time crunch, but the cake was so delicate that I couldn’t get it out of the pan without it breaking. When I tried mini cakes, those broke too. Then I discovered that the cake is slightly raw and trashed all of it. What a waste of time, effort, and money :(
My absolute most embarrassing fail is this…
For mother’s day at my church, I volunteered to make a grand dessert for about 100 people even though it was back to back finals at school. I chose to make a lemon mousse cake as a gift for my mom. The mousse took 1 1/2 days to fully complete from scratch. The cake…I didn’t have time to do a test batch, so I got my genoise recipe from Mark Matsumoto’s blog (seems legit). The ratio of egg yolk to cake was completely off, to my horror the cake prepared yesterday although golden brown, was a runny, raw orange. So I put it back in the oven until it was cooked, then 2 other people and I had a tiny bit at the end and we all agreed it was okay. BUT IT WASN’T. I worked on assembling and decorating the cake until the lunch was 2/3rds over, and although the cake was beautiful and had excellent flavor, the cake was inedible. There was a girl who baked the cake originally for me while I was preparing the mousse, but I didn’t mention her. I was the one in charge, and I have no one else to blame. So in the end, I’d spent nearly 30 hours (over 2 days) on this cake, shirked my studies (and did very poorly), served an inedible cake with my name on it, and wasted $100 of the church’s money. I was extremely stressed and embarrassed. OH MAN NEVER AGAIN.
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Dont deep fry things while wearing a bikini…. Even if its a really hot day and you just came back from the beach….
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Trying to be adventurous with my gal 2yr birthday cake… baking the Cake in the ice cream cones. turn out to be a major disaster. The batter started leaking out and soaking the cones… and the cones does not hold up at all… and worst of all it is another 2 hours before the party. In the end opt for the traditional mini cupcakes and save the party.
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