Food 103: Food Failures

Let's face it. Failures happen, especially in the kitchen. According to the lady at the supermarket who was consoling me after my first kitchen failure, "If you haven't made a mistake by now, you haven't been cooking long enough."

Even professionals mess up. If you've ever watched an episode of the Food Network's "Challenge" series you know of the many cringe worthy disasters that happen often. Imagine failing on national television--- that would definitely be enough to crush my cooking spirit.

Not so long ago my friend Rebekka and I were attempting to make a birthday cake for a mutual friend of ours. It was going to be a two tier chocolate cake with cream cheese icing. While making the cake we multi-tasked by laying out in the sun and tanning. Personally, everything I did was routine and I thought everything was going ok until we ran into our first problem. We forgot to spray the pans.

Having run into this before I quickly solved the problem by taking a butter knife and running it around the edge of the cake, then I flipped the cake pan over and gently tapped the back until the cake fell out, intact. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, however it just went downhill from there.

We iced the bottom layer of the cake, and then placed the top layer on and started icing it. Then we noticed our cake starting to crack down the center. Slowly but surely it was becoming a cake replica of the Grand Canyon. We frantically tried everything to fix it including adding more icing, cooling it in the fridge while trying to brace it together, and adding even more icing. It just wasn't working.

Finally her dad walked in and told us that there was no way on earth that we could give our friend that cake. It was a complete fail.

World, meet fail cake.

This wasn't even the worst of it. In the matter of a few minutes the rift got bigger and the cake was deemed a lost cause. We then went to Wal*Mart and purchased a cake for the low trademark rollback price of $15, and our friend loved it. Maybe the sun fried our brains while we were tanning, or maybe we just weren't having a good cooking day. Who knows. The reaction we wanted to gain from our friend was still achieved, even though it was through the means of a store bought cake with a generic Happy Birthday piped on it in cursive.

By now some of you are wondering why I'm telling you about my kitchen mishap, and I just wanted to say that mistakes happen. There's no such thing as a bad cook, and if you consider yourself one, you just haven't found the right recipe yet. Since this kitchen mishap I have successfully made a carrot cake, two batches of brownies, many omelets, yummy chicken and veggie wraps, the list goes on.

According to Adam Savage of Mythbusters, "Failure is an option," even if it is in the kitchen.

Written by Liz