Baking Gone Wrong

Cooking/baking mishap is a common phenomenon everyone cooking or baking in the kitchen must have encountered at least once (in my case pretty often) in their life. Sometimes out of unmindfulness we botch up a dish that we might have cooked umpteen times earlier by missing out on some key ingredients or blundering a crucial step. If while cooking, I enter a serious conversation with someone, chances of my forgetting something to add are ample with the final output turning awful in taste. Hence usually when I invite someone over to my place, I keep everything ready beforehand so as to avoid culinary disasters.

As if precautions are not all the time useful in keeping hazards away, sometimes, troubles come uninvited when a slight oversight in calculation can put a damper on all your efforts and hard work as it did happen yesterday while I set myself to baking a lemon pie.

Hours’ worth of pain in baking a lemon pie went down the drain when unknown to my knowledge the lemon rinds settled to the bottom of the bowl I used for mixing the ingredients and the turnout, denuded of the sweet lemony yellow color was looking pale white, to my absolute frustration. The thing went wrong from the moment in order to give scalloped edges to the pie; I changed the baking dish twice.

I admit I am still an amateur in making pies. It will take some time for me to get comfortable with the entire process of pie making. However, today I was determined to make the go successful until the shortfall in the amount of butter required caught my notice. It was too late; I didn't want to send my hubby rushing to the grocery store, third time in the evening. So I adjusted the flour and the remaining ingredients for the crust in proportion to the butter; still everything turned amiss for my one single mistake in using a pie dish smaller in size.

The crust came nice, thankfully, but the topping was in excess of what the pie dish could contain, so it spilled over. Panicked, I backed away from pouring the remaining topping batter into the pie dish and quickly putting my presence of mind into action decided upon baking a batch of lemon muffins with the residue. So I added baking powder and baking soda into the batter and just as I started spooning it into the muffin molds, my hubby gently reminded me of the muffins I baked few weeks back that were completely parched and chewy in texture as a result of my being forgetful to add butter. As luck would have it, I was forgetting butter this time too, but due to my hubby’s timely reminder I saved myself from a pang of throwing another set of muffins into the garbage bin. Since butter was absent at home on that day at that time, I used canola oil instead and voila, lemon muffins turned out really cool with color shimmering between orange and lemonish yellow. Gorgeous!

Alas! I can't say the same for the lemon pie, which to my utter dismay was pale white, the top a tad over baked. The reason for the distinguishing difference in color between the two goodies that were baked using the same batter was due to the lemon rinds accumulating at the bottom of the mixing bowl, the last dreg of which went into the muffins lending them a beautiful color whereas the lemon pie, to my oblivion, received a miniscule of the lemon rinds, the agent that lends color and flavour to lemon goodies and resultantly ended up looking drab.

On hindsight, I realize I should not have taken up the baking project at all for I was not feeling well that day since morning. You cannot expect perfect turnouts with half-hearted effort. Some pics of the baking gone wrong captured for your view: