More of Our Cooking Mistakes

Last year I wrote a short post about how we learn as home chefs by burning or otherwise ruining perectly good food. The topic is on my mind again as I have royally messed up an attempt to bake a cake in a camp dutch oven. Sometimes my ego gets in the way of me following instructions. I'm a man, what can I say. Some days, the rules just don't apply.

This is when most of my mistakes happen. There are times where a recipe is not like instructions to building a bookshelf. A bookshelf can be put together in any number of ways, but cakes are a different matter.

See, I thought I was going to be clever and make this pineapple upside-down cake a right-side up cake. Personally, I don't like how the pineapple gets all brown and gross when it's on the bottom of a cake. So I figured it would be cool to do it on top. Look how nice it looks before I closed the lid:

Problem was the cherries sank through to the bottom, and the pineapple rings busted the batter's surface tension and barely sank beneath the surface, leaving me with a final product like this:

It tasted just fine, of course, but the visual presentation was not what I had hoped for. It's the screw-ups like this that make us the cooks that we are today. Believe me, I will never do this again.

I know I'm not the only one that has fouled up a recipe or smoked out the kitchen. Chime in and let me know what your cooking mistakes have been.