Is it warm where you are? Because we just finished getting our second round of snow in two weeks! Another 12 inches or so at my house (on top of the 14 we already had) has made for a somewhat cold and dreary week.
Luckily, I had BAKING to do for my daughter’s birthday party this weekend! The perfect snow day activity.
Somewhat less luckily, my baking mojo has been WAY off this week. First, there were the cupcakes that tried to escape their mini muffin cups and then cratered in the middle. That’s OK! you say, Fill them with frosting! And I totally would have done, except that they were also so sticky in the middle that you couldn’t peel them out of their paper cups.
MAJOR, EPIC CUPCAKE FAIL.
Then! As if that weren’t enough baking catastrophe for one birthday party, I made orange cranberry scones yesterday and they turned blue.
Not just slightly off color. These are like smurfalicious blue.
They taste great! But it’s a little off putting to have blue scones when there is NOTHING blue in them!
This one had me so puzzled that I Googled it, and it turns out, it’s probably because I was making vegan “buttermilk” by adding vinegar to coconut milk. It seemed to curdle nicely, but I guess I didn’t add enough acid. Something in the baking soda turns some of the anti-oxidants in the cranberries blue, while if you have enough acid, it keeps them pink!
Oh, science, my old friend. Thank you for explaining that to me!
So, I’m baked up another batch of scones yesterday afternoon, using lemon juice to curdle my milk in the hopes that it will be acid enough to keep the cranberries their appropriate color. (At least the blue scones are edible, unlike the cupcakes!) It worked… Sort of. They are not smurf-blue like the others, but they do have a slightly grayish tinge, although they started out pink. I think it’s because this particular recipe (adapted from this one) has a whole freaking lot of baking powder in it, and somehow the acid of the lemon juice still wasn’t enough to counteract it.
NO MATTER. The party must go on. Stay tuned for pictures. 🙂
Have you had any baking mishaps lately? I’d love to hear about them! (So I don’t feel so stupid and alone…) 😉
This is not recent, but it’s so epic that my family will never forget.
My mom cannot eat refined sugars, and in the 90s the only options for substitutions were honey and fructose, neither of which bakes identically to white sugar, so you have to do substitutes, tweak the amount of eggs, vinegar, baking soda, etc. My mom loves Boston Cream Pie and hadn’t had any in over a decade, so I tried making her one using fructose instead of sugar, and the cake layers did not rise/puff up AT ALL. They ended up flat as crepes. But my mom ate them anyway with the cream filling and chocolate sauce (both of which turned out just fine). All you have to say is “Boston cream pancake” and we both collapse in giggles.
LOVE it! Of course, the name of my website is based on a classic family fail! (Though my grandmother would never call it that!)
A baking fail? At altitude? NEVER!
OK, I lied. I seem to have established, though years of research (trials and tribulations) a pretty decent method to get pretty decent results but I’m never confident until the end result appears. Living at altitude is like Mad Science isn’t it?
Still, I can’t normally complain…and then I tried making an Angel Food Cake. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
It didn’t seem to rise as much as I thought it would but I was OK with that so turned it over on it’s cute little angel food cakepan feet and turned away. I soon heard a ‘plop’ and turned around to see it had fallen out of the pan. All 1″ of it. Yep…a 1 inch tall Angel Food Cake. Epic, huge #FAIL!!
I thought I would rescue it as bars or something but it was just plain awful. So awful I have not ventured down that path again…at least not yet. Let me just tell you it makes your muffins look fabulous!
HA! This is hardly my first. Someday, I’ll tell you about the exploding Splenda cake…
I'd love to know HOW you made the scones blue. That would be fun for a themed party or brunch, don't you think?
Well, I THINK if you just added extra baking powder/baking soda or less acid, they will turn blue on their own!
We’ve all had some amazing baking fails at some point or other- although I’ve never turned anything blue (as yet!!). My simplest was getting our flour cannisters mixed up and making some scones with plain flour- Think flat bread rolls and you have the idea.
I get it right in the end though after some unfinished scone business!