Top 5 Baking Disasters

After yesterdays chocolate cake 'incident', it got me thinking about the other times I have foolishly thought to myself 'that seems easy' when watching Great British Bake Off or anything on the Good Food Channel. (Thug life). I'm hoping compiling this list will be good for the soul, and also will hopefully make me think twice before taking a whack at a recipe with anything French in the title.

So, here are my Top 5 Baking Disasters. Jesus Christ. 

1. The Brownies. 
I was helping my Granny bake Brownies for some sort of 'Thing' we were having. Me and my sister actually said the other day that a lot of our childhood memories involve being in the back of a car, holding onto cake or sandwiches, hurtling up the M40 to Harrow for some sort of event, where we were told how tall we are by various aunts and cousins. 
Anyway, I was 'helping' and instead of cracking the eggs into the mixture, I instead thought it would make much more sense to crack them onto the worktop, and sort of scrap them into the mixture. I still can't think of any logic to this, and was never asked to help again. I was only five, which is quite a good excuse. 

2. The Shepard's Pie. 
Not technically baking, and by the end of the whole debacle not technically food either. 
It was during Food Tech, and I had decided to make Shepard's Pie, I think for Coeliacs. Anyway, I made everything you were supposed to, getting very smug about how well it was all going, until it came to assembling the bloody thing. For some reason, God knows why, I  put the mashed potato on the bottom and the meat on the top. I was fifteen. I had been having Shepard's Pie all my life. I still don't understand. 
So, tried to sort of reverse it, it didn't work so I just thought well, I'll cook it anyway, and just serve it upside down. No. My poor family, that night they were forced to eat what can only be described as Shepard's Pie Soup.
I'm so sorry. 

3. The Red Velvet Cake. 
What sort of cake recipe wants you to use vinegar? It was awful. So awful, it didn't even make it to the oven. 
To begin with, I had run out of flour, and the only flour left was wholemeal, and I thought, well it's all the same really isn't it (it isn't). I had to sift out the wholemeal bits, which was half the bloody flour in the end, and it was sort of brown because of it being 'healthy', so I overcompensated on the red food dye to make up for it, which made everything smell a bit arsenic-y, and then I couldn't get the lid off the bloody vinegar, and I was supposed to be at my friend's house, and I forgot to turn the oven on, and it all turned a bit like that scene in Bridget Jone's when she's trying to cook dinner for her friends, and makes blue soup. Except in my case, Colin Firth didn't turn up out of the blue and rescue me, the selfish bastard. 
Moral of the story, don't cook anything coloured. 

4. The Lemon Scones. 
I rolled them out into centimetres instead of inches. They were like very, very shit biscuits that didn't taste of lemon because I got bored of zesting. 

5. The Chocolate Whoopee Pies. 
They were supposed to be like a children's version of macaroons, except, for some reason they turned into the size of a small child's face. 
Oh my God, they were like a meal in themselves, I have never in my life had to eat something for desert which was physically heavier than my dinner. It took three marshmallows to sandwich the things together. We kept them in the tin for two weeks, and had to throw them away as, quite rightly, no one ate them. 

I would just like to take this moment to say that I make a very good Victoria Sponge and Millionaire's Shortbread. And I once made fudge. 

Love, L xxx