For a long time I never did anything adventurous in the kitchen. I followed the instructions on the back of the packet, that was it.
Even when I made the shift towards more ‘made from scratch’ food, I never strayed far from the recipe in the book because I knew disaster would befall me if I did.
But slowly, over time, I gained more confidence, and began to figure out the basics of cooking. And while I am still not confident I have a great grasp of the science behind the recipes, these days I play around, add and change recipes all the time. Usually it works out ok… sometimes even brilliantly… and sometimes it fails miserably.
Last week was one of those epic fail moments.
I started out strong. If they taste good as brownies, they’d make great fudge-y, cake-y cookies right?
I had my doubts at around the halfway mark, and wondered if I should add a little more or less of something to get them to hold a cookie shape better, but I pushed those fears aside and forged ahead.
They looked good as I dolloped them onto the tray and put them into the oven… but only a few minutes later they had fail written all over them.
Instead of nice cake-like cookies I had giant, flat, slabs of cookie. Not at all what I had imagined.
As they sat cooling off and looking sad, I tried to figure out where I went wrong and what I should have added to the recipe to turn brownies into cookies… another egg? more flour? maybe I should have chilled the mixture first?
As I pondered my disaster Morgan came into the kitchen.
“oooh giant cookies… can I have one??”
“Sure” I said, still lost in my disaster debriefing.
A few minutes later the rest of the kids hovered around me.
“Can we have one too?”
“Me too!!”
Morgan put his hand out for another cookie and it suddenly dawned on me that my failed cookies might look a bit odd, but perhaps they still tasted ok. If my picky kids were eating them, and coming back for more, they must not be too horrible. So I had a bite… and actually they tasted pretty damn good!
A little chewy and very chocolatey with yummy caramel chips. Not the cookies I had planned to bake, but not bad at all.
I’ve made them twice since the first ‘failure’, adding a little extra flour and a little less butter, and I call them fail cookies, to remind myself that not all failures are bad!
- 90 gms butter
- ½ cup of cocoa
- ¾ cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 cup self raising flour
- 1 cup caramel chips
- Preheat your oven to 160 degrees C (approx 320 F).
- Line a large tray with baking paper
- In a medium sized bowl melt the butter, add the cocoa and mix until smooth.
- Add the sugar and eggs and mix well.
- Add the vanilla and fold through the flour and caramel chips till combined.
- Place large spoonfuls of mixture onto the tray with lots of space between them as they will spread.
- Bake at 160 C for approx 15-20 minutes or until the edges begin to get crispy. Do not over cook!
i have had so many spectacular baking fails! Some still tasted ok, others not so much! Those giant cookies look pretty good tho!
Oh I have had some massive fails! Once I had to throw out a saucepan because I had forgotten about the toffee I was making and there was no way it was ever going to come out!!! The cookies look yummy – no fail there!!!
These cookies looks delicious and far from a fail. Children are (usually) not fussy and don’t see the imperfections we see. I’m not a very good I have to admit. I’m one of those types of cooks that has to measure everything to a tee and can’t ever be confident enough to give things a go. Hopefully one day I’ll be better at that. :)
I’m always changing recipes and modifying and there are often fails but some of the best recipes have come from the fails! Yours look yummy, going to give them a try tomorrow with my girls, thanks for sharing your fail x