A little bit of success with a dash of fail...
I won't even go into my hard drive crashing last night in the middle of a job app. Or that the repair people aren't sure they can resurrect the damn thing. And that it will cost a couple hundred bucks to find out either way and I *still* need to shell out another hundred for a new hard drive. That or buy a new laptop. Yeah, we're not going to do that. I already promised Michael that he could buy a new laptop as soon as I get a job. *When* I get a job. *If* I get a job. Sheesh.
Anyway, I've been keeping busy with job apps and yard work and cooking and baking my way through about a million bookmarked recipes. Many of my tasty finds can be found over here. There have been trials of really good recipes and then there have been some food fails along the way. Honestly, that doesn't happen very often but when it does, boy, is it spectacular.
Recent fails include a bread recipe and not double checking to make sure I didn't need to grease the loaf pan before putting the dough in it. Oops. I had to pry that sucker out of the pan and then ripped some fairly large chunks out in the process. I was able to salvage almost all of the loaf and it tasted really good so it was okay in the end. Still, a forgetting-to-grease-the-pan-first fail. Bad.
Then there was the lemon bar recipe wherein I wanted to add some blueberries between the shortbread and lemon curd. Except that I didn't think about the moisture content of the berries and did not think to thaw,rinse and drain them first. Oh, shit, this was a massive fail. For one thing, I managed to slop some of the batter onto my oven door and it baked on to the glass. Then, by the time it was cooked through, the curd was overcooked on the top, the middle was this nasty curdled looking purplish stuff and the shortbread just could not be saved. I had to dump the whole thing in the trash and start over. It was even decent enough to take to Michael's office. It looked like the dog's breakfast, as my FIL likes to say.
Today, I had another fail but not one of disastrous proportions. I wanted to get a head start on the luncheon I'm preparing for Michael's birthday next week and I thought I would go ahead and bake the cake and then freeze it until Monday. The recipe I used was fine but I used cake pans that were just a smidge too small and now I have these huge domed cake rounds that are cracked to high heaven. I was planning on making a devil's food cake with choc. buttercream but I think I'm now making chocolate blackout cake. I'm going to cut the top parts of the cake off and break them into small crumbs. After I frost the remaining cake layers, I'll press the cake crumbs into the side and voila! Chocolate blackout cake. Not the end of the world but also not what I was going for. Michael won't care and wouldn't even think anything of it if I hadn't typed it up here for the world to see. At least with this one, I can make lemonade out of my lemons. It's sort of like a mystery fail. No one will know but me.