S/O Proud kitchen moments -- Kitchen disasters

[athersgeo]

2) My FSIL is a great sweet baker - mostly in the line of brownies and muffins, but she also does various cakes and whatnot too. My brother has a sweet tooth. So, for Valentine's Day last year she decided to try her hand at Kendal Mint Cake...and set fire to their kitchen. I don't believe any serious damage was done (other than to the pan she'd been using) - but I do know she's never planning to try THAT again!

Isn't Kendal Mint Cake just peppermint creams covered in chocolate?  Where did the fire come from?

It involved sugar syrup, which is what I assume caught fire. Kendal mint cake (the stuff you get actually in the Lake District, at any rate) is rather more dense than a peppermint cream, and doesn't feature chocolate (as far as I remember!)

As for bubble and squeak, it's supposed to be pretty much what Thipu1 said, but what the chef had left me with (to rehear in the oven) was a tray of broccoli, sliced cooked potato and maybe a couple of slivers of cabbage. It looked vile, smelled worse and should in now way have been inflicted on anyone, much less the inmates of a nursing home!

[NyaChan]

Is a Kendal Mint Cake like a York Peppermint Patty?

[Twik]

Bubble and squeak described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_and_squeak.

It does sound like a good way to use leftover vegetables, and the calories were probably of less concern when more people were manual labourers.

[andi]

Oh - just in case it wasn't well known - expiration dates on dried foods should be taken into account, especially when it's over 2 years past

I accidentally made cornbread that was 2 years past due - oh very very bad. The one bite left a horrid taste in my mouth for days. 

Same goes for Durkees French Fried onions. Rancid oil is not good for you.  That mistake meant a last minute trip to the grocery store 5 minutes before they cooed on Thanksgiving Day

[Twik]

This is a story about my best friend, who was a truly inspired cook. Dinners at her place were always a true joy. However, once she went a step too far.

It was a simple recipe, for chocolate mousse. To create a fancy presentation, the recipe suggested making chocolate cups. The method they recommended was to blow up balloons, and dip them in melted chocolate. Then, after the chocolate cooled, you pop the balloons, and end up with the cups in the shape of the bottom of the balloons.

So, my friend was in the kitchen creating these cups for dessert. She's so confident of her skills, she's wearing a white silk blouse while handling chocolate. But there was a fatal flaw in the plan - apparently, all balloons are not created equal. It appears that she had chosen balloons that were not heat-resistant. About 5 minutes after dipping, all four balloons burst, spraying molten chocolate all over the kitchen.

We guests heard the pops, and the shriek, and walked in, to a truly amazing scene. It was like a 3-dimensional Jackson Pollack painting, done in chocolate. After a few minutes of stunned silence, one guest asked, "I never thought I'd say this ... but can I lick your walls?"

When she moved out two years later, there were still chocolate stains on the stucco ceiling. The silk blouse was ruined. And we ate our chocolate mousse out of glass bowls that night.

[Kaora]

Also, never let me near syrups...

I once tried making some absolutely delicious sounding chocolate syrup out of one of Alton Brown's books.  It came out delicious, then I stuck it in a thin necked, glass bottle.  I think it was a salad dressing bottle.

I put it in the fridge, and when I went to have some more later, it froze.  I mean, it was a solid brown chunk stuck in a bottle where it was impossible to get to. O_o

My mum eventually helped me get it out (lots of warm water), but never again.

Of course, you think I would've learned from my first time...

I once heard of sugar syrup on Good Eats.  I decided I would make some for some iced tea, because I have a real sweet tooth.  I followed the directions, put it in a Pyrex glass cup and left in the fridge for later.

Went to retrieve it, and it also froze solid.  I couldn't get it out except hours of work washing it, chipping it, hoping I could fix it before my parents would get home.  Thankfully, they were away on a trip for a couple weeks.

Also, Dulce de Leche.  Geeze, is Alton Brown a bad influence on me.

I love love love the stuff, and have gotten plenty of it canned before.  Mum got the condensed milk for me, and let me try to make it while they were out for the day.

I followed the directions, only my mum said I could microwave it, so that is what I did.  I was stirring it every couple of minutes while it went around the microwave, and around 15 minutes in to its 20 minute time, it started smoldering.  Whoops.

I yanked it out and all was well, but no tastiness for me that day.  Smelled like badly burnt sugar for a few days, though.

[o_gal]

Don't know if this is a "kitchen" disaster, but it did involve cooking, just over a grill outside of the kitchen.

The first time that we made maple syrup, we were boiling it off in a shallow pan on our gas grill (since that time, DH has built his own syrup evaporator that we use in the backyard at the fire pit.) Since we hadn't done this before, we were trying to be careful and watch the sap closely. But with 3 year old DS, it was mainly DH doing the watching while I did kid duty.

When you boil a liquid, as the liquid boils down, it starts to evaporate faster because you are dealing with a lesser and lesser amount of liquid. Our first batch turned not into syrup, not into sugar, but into this really, really sticky maple toffee (tasted OK but also a bit burnt). We were able to scrape what was left into a coffee cup, and get the pan clean. But it's really discouraging to be boiling about 5 gallons of sap down for hours only to end up with a coffee cup of thick, toffee-like stuff that can't be poured over pancakes 

[Outdoor Girl]

Don't know if this is a "kitchen" disaster, but it did involve cooking, just over a grill outside of the kitchen.

The first time that we made maple syrup, we were boiling it off in a shallow pan on our gas grill (since that time, DH has built his own syrup evaporator that we use in the backyard at the fire pit.) Since we hadn't done this before, we were trying to be careful and watch the sap closely. But with 3 year old DS, it was mainly DH doing the watching while I did kid duty.

When you boil a liquid, as the liquid boils down, it starts to evaporate faster because you are dealing with a lesser and lesser amount of liquid. Our first batch turned not into syrup, not into sugar, but into this really, really sticky maple toffee (tasted OK but also a bit burnt). We were able to scrape what was left into a coffee cup, and get the pan clean. But it's really discouraging to be boiling about 5 gallons of sap down for hours only to end up with a coffee cup of thick, toffee-like stuff that can't be poured over pancakes 

Oh, you rookie!     What you do with that nice toffee is that while it is still hot, you pour it on snow.  Then you use a popcicle stick to wind it up and make a lollipop.  Then you eat a dill pickle to kill the sweetness and have another one.  It is called 'sugaring off'.

We have a sugar shack and can get the sap down to about 3 gallons of almost syrup.  Then we finish it off in the house in a big soup pot, using a thermometer to measure when it gets to syrup.  Sometimes, the syrup will foam up and boil over.  That's the biggest mess you've ever seen.  You have to clean out all the burners and probably clean the oven because it drips down into it and the stove top will still be sticky everytime you touch it for about a month.

We used to have sugaring off parties.  People would come around 8, we'd have a pot of syrup swinging on a tripod over an open fire to boil it down to the toffee stage for pouring on the snow.  We'd have beverages in the snow; people would sit around the fire and talk, we'd eat the toffee when it was ready (only the kids did the dill pickle trick) and Mom would put on a midnight sugarbush supper.  Maple baked beans, maple glazed ham, tossed salad with maple French dressing, maple syrup pie, boiled maple loaf, maple syrup muffins and homemade bread.

[hermanne]

^ Outdoor Girl, that sounds very Little House, aka "Dance at Grandpa's". Wish I could've seen it! 

[o_gal]

Don't know if this is a "kitchen" disaster, but it did involve cooking, just over a grill outside of the kitchen.

The first time that we made maple syrup, we were boiling it off in a shallow pan on our gas grill (since that time, DH has built his own syrup evaporator that we use in the backyard at the fire pit.) Since we hadn't done this before, we were trying to be careful and watch the sap closely. But with 3 year old DS, it was mainly DH doing the watching while I did kid duty.

When you boil a liquid, as the liquid boils down, it starts to evaporate faster because you are dealing with a lesser and lesser amount of liquid. Our first batch turned not into syrup, not into sugar, but into this really, really sticky maple toffee (tasted OK but also a bit burnt). We were able to scrape what was left into a coffee cup, and get the pan clean. But it's really discouraging to be boiling about 5 gallons of sap down for hours only to end up with a coffee cup of thick, toffee-like stuff that can't be poured over pancakes 

Oh, you rookie!     What you do with that nice toffee is that while it is still hot, you pour it on snow.  Then you use a popcicle stick to wind it up and make a lollipop.  Then you eat a dill pickle to kill the sweetness and have another one.  It is called 'sugaring off'.

Well, really really sticky toffee doesn't pour. Over pancakes or over snow. It was just a thick sludge in the coffee cup - you could spoon it out and eat it, if you really wanted to. I think it sat in the house waiting for someone to eat it for about a week before I cleaned out the cup.

Sap's running again! We should be having to put more sap jugs in our fridge today. We've been eating down everything to make room for them. We learned the hard (pun intended) way what happens if you have to store it for awhile and don't keep it cold. I'm sure the alcohol would have burned off with all that boiling, but that year we dumped it.

[Outdoor Girl]

Wow - you really over cooked it.

Ours isn't running yet and shouldn't run for a while yet - I hope.  I'm not ready to run to my Dad's every weekend!

The worst way to ruin a batch of syrup?

Stoke the fire really good, not realizing that there are cracks in the chimney.  When you Dad goes up in half an hour to do his turn at stoking, he notices that the sugar shack on fire - more of a low smolder, really.  Make your daughter wonder why you've come back down to the house several times and going back up to the shack.  Then use 2 or 3 fire extinguishers to put out the fire, a chain saw to cut down the still smoldering section of wall and toss it into the snow bank.  The chemical stuff inside ABC fire extinguishers?  Is really hard to clean out of a stainless steel pan.

[marcel]

Yesterday I made some red cabbage, which needs to simmer for about an hour. I put it on, and then went to watch some tv. When I checked it out half an hour later, I found that I accidentaly left it on full heat So I didn't have dinner, and I lost one of my cast iron pans (luckily it was a cheap one).

(The smell was so bad, that at some point the woman who lives on the top floor came down because she was afraid there was a fire somewhere.)

[drzim]

I admit that I am very amused by the fact that the kitchen disasters thread is much longer than the kitchen "successes" thread!

My most memorable was the time I wanted to cook breakfast for my mom on mother's day morning.  I had a recipe for cinnamon rolls all picked out from my Betty Crocker cookbook.  Alas, I was only 8 so my dad had to be involved.  Apparently, no one told him that there is a difference between baking powder and baking soda.  We ended up with hockey pucks that tasted horrible.

[Elfmama]

I don't know what I did to ruin the gingerbread muffins that I made, but I suspect that I left out the baking soda, because they didn't rise.  At all.  Not done in the middle either, IIRC.  I cut them into slices, put them back into the oven at about 175^oF, and left them there until they were hard as rocks.

The dog thought they were the best treats ever. 

[Katana_Geldar]

I've managed to get making pastry in the food processor so that it's as good as store bought pastry!

Now it's great for my juices and pies.