FAVOR JEWELRY
A good bakery will anticipate your every whim with a wide variety of confections. There are the earthy, humble cookies–you’re everyday dependable treat. The darling cupcakes, so sweet with their buttercream bouffants, or the delicate shortbreads you turn to when you want a lift rather than a rush. And then there are the special occasion lovelies. The petit fours, macarons, and Sacher-Torts you savor infrequently.
Today is a Sacher-Tort day. Not cute or kitschy, Monika Reed of Favor Jewelry designs and sells jewelry that reflects the individuality and aesthetic of the body it adorns. There is no attempt to commandeer or develop trends, no forced attempt at irony, and no dreaded contrivances. Reed designs and produces by hand all the components and pieces in her simple and direct collection of jewelry featuring recycled metals and gemstones. We think it’s the perfect bit of sugar-sugar for those nights when your goal is more ambrosial than sweet.
Monika Reed of Favor Jewelry is giving away one pair of Framed Orbital Earrings with Quartz. In order to win, please answer the following question by Sunday, August 23, 2009.
What has been your biggest sweet treat disaster?
Please start checking the winner’s box on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 to see if you won. Good Luck!
I made a batch of fig oatmeal cookies and the recipe called for 1 and a half cups of sugar. I accidentally added 2 full cups of sugar and it ended up being totally sweet!
My biggest sweet treat disaster was when I made a very labor intensive chocolate layer cake for my daughter’s birthday one year, only to trip over the threshold while going to serve it, and having it smash all over the kitchen floor.
My mom and I were making our family tradition pumpkin donuts one autumn and got distracted in another room… and burned down the kitchen.
oh my, once while making my signature chocolate chip cookies i wasn’t paying attention and DOUBLED the flour. colossal mistake.
I added cayenne pepper to an apple crisp recipe, thinking I had added cinnamon! I didn’t realize it until we were eating it at a dinner party. What a surprise!
I am not confident in the kitchen, but when I met my now-fiance 3 years ago, I was determined to make him a birthday cake (2 months after we met) that would be worthy of someone so special and unique. So, I set to work on a layer cake with homemade icing in between. I’m still not sure what went wrong, but the icing kept melting and the layers kept sliding OFF of the ones below. I tried stacking things next to it to hold it in place, but when it became clear that this wouldn’t work (and with an hour to spare before our dinner plans), I rushed out to get a bundt pan to put it all in and hold it together. As I quickly pulled out of my driveway, I **RAMMED** right into my roommate’s car. She had come home and dropped it offin the driveway, right behind my car, unannounced.
I was heartbroken over the cake AND the car, but he reminded me that it’s just money and that my heart had the right intentions. And he chuckled as we ate the completely-separated cake. And said it tasted pretty good.
It was my first time attending a mom’s group/ play date and decided to bring banana bread. Easy-peasy, right? Not so. The hostess sliced into it and inside was a gooey mess. Apparently, the well-done top stripped the goo off of the cake tester. How embarrassing!
I made a chocolate cake one day for a school party. And when a girl ate it she said: “who make this cake? it is so tough!”. I was so embarrassed. It was awful!
One Christmas I attempted to make gingerbread cookies and left out a key ingredient along the way. Lets just say my gingerbread men were better suited for decoration. They most certainly could have chipped a tooth.
I once tried to bake a cake using expired baking powder. I learned the hard way that baking powder used beyond its expiration date is absolutely useless! The cake didn’t rise and was completely inedible.
Last Christmas I was trying to make classic pine nut (pignoli) cookies and couldn’t find my tried and true recipe – found one on the internet and followed the directions to a T – they spread all over the cookie pan into one very large inedible cookie which couldn’t be lifted off the parchment paper – what a mess. Luckily, I found the old recipe when renovating the kitchen, so this year will be all good!
I ate a brownie that had hot pepper flavor to it and it was great. I decided to copy it…not so easy. I added some Hot seasoning to it. The taste turned out to be so salty it made you gag and the the heat got you as you tried to over come the salt!!!!!!!!
Creme brulle is my favorite dessert. I would not consider myself a chef by any means but I do believe I can cook and bake. This little number has haunted me for years. I have yet to make an edible batch. I’m tride and true with my efforts, but no matter the temperature at the stove or in the oven my Creme brulle comes out like scrambled runny eggs. I do however make a killer chocolate flan, go figure.
My biggest disaster was baking a cake for a bake sale, and when taking it out of the pan, dropped it on the kitchen floor. It was in pieces…chocolate cake everywhere. So I quickly baked some bars and took them to the bake sale while still warm. I was NOT happy…although our dog thought it was great and ate some before I got it all cleaned up!
I was too impatient to have my butter cake baking in the oven so I slid my baking pans in even when the temp was not hot enough. Uhhuh. I got 2 loaves of butter cake which were heavier than I wanted them to be :(
If you mean something I tried to make: That would be the time the oven decided to just stop working when I preheated it to make my then-fiance’s birthday cake. We ended up having to have a repairman come and fix it.
But the first thing I thought of when I read the question was the time that my brother and I decided to see who could stuff the most sour patch kids candy in their mouth at one time. I won (34) but I’ve never been able to eat them since. There were so many in my mouth that I couldn’t chew and then they started to melt down the back of my throat. Gag inducing to this day.
When I was 18, I invited my dad’s girlfriend over for dinner. I had no culinary skills (absolutley NONE), but made a simple meal anyway. For dessert, we had red jello with marshmallows in it. She ate it with joy and a smile in her heart.
That wonderful lady has been my stepmom for 25 years now. She still laughs with me about that jello.
I was assigned to make pecan pie for Thanksgiving one year. I had never made it before and didn’t realize that you could not bake a graham craker pre-made crust. Needless to say, it turned into a sticky gooey burnt mess and the worst part was it dripped all over my oven and the whole house smelled horrible for weeks!
A wonderful batch of double chocolate brownies, a family favorite, was eaten by our dog – every last one of them. He didn’t leave a crumg. Chocolate being toxic to dogs, he got so sick. Poor guy was in the doggie hospital for over a week. Thankfully he recovered just fine and at 13 he’s still doing great. Needless to say we learned to be very careful with chocolate at our house.
I recently made a batch of sugar cookies with my daughter. I have yet to find an easy to work with recipe. We were cutting the cookies in sea life shapes – fish, dolphins, lobsters, seahorses, etc. Because the recipe was so soft (even after refrigerating), it would not hold together properly or come off the counter easily. Lobsters had missing claws, dolphins lost tails, fish lost their fins, and seahorses were decapitated. Luckily it was just for our enjoyment. We iced the injuries back togehter the best we could and proceeded to eat the maimed sea animals. Thankfully the incident did not scar my daughter for life, nor did she need counseling after witnessing the horrible injuries. I, however, have been put off another sugar cookie adventure for good (well, maybe til Christmas).
I am not the world’s greatest baker so it would figure that my biggest disaster with a sweet treat involves spilling it on myself. One afternoon last summer I was embarking on a day that was to begin with a family christening followed by a 40 minute drive to a baby shower (wow lots of babies these past 2 years!). Needed a bit of caffine on my way to the christening and debated whether or not to stop for a coffee as I was wearing a white skirt. I figured one of those blended coffee drinks would be less likely to spill on me however, I neglected to take into account the lid not being quite as snug as it should have been and sloshed a big dollop on my lap in my car. Had to make a pit stop at a pharmacy for a clorox bleach pen and some water to dilute it with but it worked! Despite being 20 minutes late to the Christening it had just started due to the parents of the bebe having just arrived due to traffic. Whew
Never come home after a night out and bake. So I get a little hungry after a few glasses of wine because I hadn’t ate much at the restaurant. Went to make brownies, Boxed Brownies:-) Well I decided to make them healthy so put in some different stuff. After about a hr or so of cooking them they were still soupy so then I threw them in the fridge hoping to harden them up. Didn’t work so I had some soupy, ‘healthy’ brownies that no one wanted to eat.
I am an experienced baker, but as I want to assure the above novices…everyone has a failure or two! I had relatives staying with us for the weekend and the family reunion party, at my house. In the morning I rose early and put together my blueberry coffee cake, an enormous thing baked in a tube pan. Well, it must have been early and I did not have my glasses on when I set the temperature. The cake was sure enough done on the outside, but when I went to turn it out it ran all over the place! Oh well, pancakes are good, right? Guess again, I was so anxious I ended up burning a few of those!
Fortunately, I was able to redeem myself later with my very Italian family, with
a delicious mixed grill and 150 handmade manicotti, crepe style not the macaroni ones!!!
Never had one – the terms “sweet treat” and “disaster” just don’t go together for me! In my experience, no attempt at making a sweet treat, no matter how arduous, has been a complete disaster – you still end up a with a little bit of yummy to, at the very least, lick off the bowl.
I tried to make a cake for the 4th of July and when I went to bring it out, I tripped on the dog and dropped it! It was so sad. I spent all afternoon making the top of the cake look like a flag (with strawberries, blueberries, etc).
Those earrings are positively gorgeous!
It was my first sweet treat disaster: I was about 12 years old, showing off my newly learned baking skills to my family. All Sunday afternoon, I prepared a beautiful chocolate mousse, step by step by step. It was delicious, with one rather large bitterness problem. I had not realized that there were different kinds of boxed baking chocolate, and had picked the pure bitter kind, and I know I didn’t add very much (if any) sugar to the recipe…. so my family was in for a bit of a treat. It was a humbling experience for a precocious 12 year old.
One christmas I wanted to make a special sugar cookie that had cream cheese in it. I mixed up all the dough and it tasted wonderful. But when I tried to roll it out and cut out the cookie shapes it was a disaster. The dough was so sticky I couldn’t get it off the rolling pin. Luckily my mom was there and helped me work it out. We had to use a ton of flour and it took forever to get all the cookie shapes cut out. We had to use so much flour to get the dough rolled out that the cookies ended up tasting like flour cookies, despite the sugar sprinkles on top. I’ll stick to regular sugar cookies that I know are good.
In college, a friend and I tried to make these Double Chocolate Treasure cookies that are so yummy. Only problem is, you have to melt the chocolate and we tried to use the microwave. I had seen my mom do it lots of times, what could go wrong, right? Well, we burnt the chocolate so badly that it turned into powder! We just kept heating it, hoping it would re-melt, but it just kept getting worse. It made for a really funny memory, but we missed out on some really great cookies!
This is easy since it just happened a few weeks ago. My father was celebrating his 80th birthday so I decided to make him a chocolate sheet cake and decorate the top to look like a golf course. The cake looked great and tasted great. That night after my parents went to bed, my husband and I had some wine. I had a HUGE chocolate craving and ate the rest of the cake, almost the entire cake! I was mortified the next day, but my dad was very gracious, especially since my mom had a wedge of frozen cake in the basement fridge.
Never ice a cake with butter cream frosting while it’s still hot. Never.
My baking disaster involves a cooling cake sitting on the counter and my big chocolate labrador dog. He basically stalked the cake and once I left the room, he jumped up and ate the whole thing. Luckily, it had not been frosted yet with the chocolate icing. Bad dog!
i will preface the story that in the end, it turn out alright. for the most part.
i had just moved into a new house with new people, a few of them being new to me. i decided to make a berry cobbler in a good old fashioned pyrex dish. the recipe said to cover it when i put it in the oven, and without thinking, i grabbed a plastic pyrex cover from the cabinet and hastened the cobbler into the oven. 20 minutes later i started thinking about that plastic when it dawned on me that it would not make it through the heat. rushing to the oven, i found plastic melted all over the sides of the pyrex, onto the bottom of the oven and a little bit beginning to make its way onto the cobbler.
luckily, the cobbler was saved. but one of the room mates i hardly know now had a ruined pyrex cover. :(
When I was 11 and my sister was 13, we decided to make a cake for my dad’s birthday. Neither of us was exactly skilled in the culinary arts, but we figured it wouldn’t be too hard to follow a recipe. The cake finished baking and, although we thought it looked a little strange, we excitedly headed over to my dad’s house to surprise him. We sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ my dad blew out his candles, and we cut him a huge piece. It was then that we noticed the cake had the consistency and color similar to old yellow Play-Doh. I am certain that my dad noticed this too, but he smiled and took a huge bite. My sister and I also tried the cake, but we were not smiling. It didn’t even taste like cake-flavored Play-Doh. It tasted like Play-Doh-flavored Play-Doh. To this day, I have no idea how he chewed and swallowed. Later, we discovered that we had mistakenly used baking soda instead of baking powder. If anything, I think it’s a testament to my amazing dad.
Because I don’t bake – or cook at all for that matter – I have no baking disasters to relate. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to baked good disasters. Once (not too long ago, in fact), I’d picked up a gorgeous three-layers chocolate/raspberry cake concoction for a friend’s going-away party, inscribed with a special quote wishing her well. In a maneuver reminiscent of Lucy Ricardo herself, I tripped on my way out of the bakery. Splat!
While the cake was not destroyed, we can say that it “slipped” a bit. The momentum of the fall unmoored the layers, so that I was left with a pronounced leaning-tower-of-Piza effect.
I refused to be daunted and delivered the cake as planned. Regaled with the accompanying story, my friend enjoyed the defective cake even more than she might have the original.
My biggest sweet treat disaster is chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream! Once I start, I just can’t stop! So good!
Making an Angel Food cake in a pan that wasn’t quite big enough…in my Mother-In-Laws oven…….BIG, HUGE, STICKY burnt mess! I still have nightmares about it!
A friend and I were recently reminiscing about a pie I’d had when visiting relatives in Kentucky as a child–derby pie. It’s like pecan pie, sort of, with chocolate. Amazing. She tried to surprise me by making me one, only it turned out a gooey, sloppy (albeit delicious) mess. SO I decided to surprise her by making one (it would turn out fine, I was sure of it) and mine was an even gooier, sloppier mess. Both were delicious, though! It’s fun to eat pie with a spoon with your best friend.
Hands down, the biggest sweet treat disaster of mine is a Peanut Butter Cheesecake. I found the recipe online and it had multiple thumbs up recommendations. So, there I was, spending most of the day baking up this supposedly fabulous dessert. In the end, it did look very tempting. But, once everyone took a bit, they couldn’t finish their slices. The cheesecake was simply too rich, and toothachingly so. Even I couldn’t finish my piece, which says a lot about the disappointing dessert.
Hands down, Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively “Delicious” Gingerbread Spice Cake, which calls for broccoli and carrot. My house smelled like sweaty gym socks for a week, even after we threw away the offending brick.
I ate almost an entire batch of Pillsbury sugar cookies in one sitting… I tried to get my room mates to help me, but they mostly just laughed at my stomach ache.
Constantly forgetting to add baking powder to cake recipes. Sigh. They’re still good, just not so fluffy.
Everytime I bake is a sweet treat disaster. Whatever it is I am making is bound to turn out burnt or just not quite right.
I started receiving a CSA Farm share last summer and delighted in the variety of fruits and vegetables that arrived each week. After the 4th week of beets however I decided to get a little creative. Instead of the standard grilled or roasted beets I thought I’d try a cake. As I pulled them from the oven and placed them on the cooling racks, the bottoms promptly turned to mush and started dripping through the rack. Apparently applesauce and beets don’t mix together to make a healthier cake.
As a young newlywed (7 months) I determined to bake my hubby’s favorite cake from home , a red velvet, as a surprise for his first birthday as my husband. He was in the military and we were a long way from home and the comforts of his family’s baking. I carefully planned using a recipe out of the women’s club cookbook from his hometown that we had been given as a wedding gift. Made my list and off to the store… I had to buy EVERYTHING, including the lots of red food coloring, three round cake pans, tools to mix up the batter; we had very little in the way of kitchen supplies then. I worked diligently a better part of the day, and got my three round red batter-filled pans into the oven. While they baked I hand chopped the nuts and mixed them into the cream cheese frosting to go between each layer and cover the top. I put that to wait into the fridge and worked on cleaning up a rather large mess in our tiny kitchen. I had noticed when mixing up the cake that there was no baking soda or powder called for. Which I DID think was unusual, but I had no experience with red velvet cake and I though maybe the vinegar and salt called for somehow made up for the lack. They didn’t. I ended up with three beautifully round, rich red frisbees and a LOT of yummy icing. 23 years later I have never made him another red-velvet cake (or frisbee) and we’re both perfectly fine with that. :)
My boyfriend had told me his mother made the best Butter Pecan cake while he was growing up. So, for his birthday, I set out make one myself. I spent hours on this cake – a three layer cake with painstaking effort put into the icing. Once it was ready, it looked and smelled amazing. Then it came time to eat it… It was the most dry cake I have ever tried to eat. Nothing like mama made it, I’m sure. Come to find out later, mom’s “homemade” butter pecan cake comes out of a box made by Betty Crocker. Ugh.
my biggest disaster was also pretty funny. I was making cupcakes (my favorite thing to make) and i had the ingredients in the mixing bowl. I turned it on and the dry ingredients blew up in my face! I had flower all over!
I’m an avid baker, and one of my early endeavors (age 9) included baking a chocolate cake for my next door neighbor’s birthday. I’m not exactly sure where I messed up, but the cake actually looked great. I proudly presented it to my neighbor and his wife, and they graciously went to cut a slice of it to eat. The knife went all the way down to the plate, then the cake sprung right back up as if nothing had ever touched it – it was that rubbery!
My neighbors were incredibly sweet (and brave!) people, and somehow managed to gouge some cake off and actually ate some. I tried a piece myself and I can tell you I’d had bubblegum with less give…
i make a delicious strawberry cake…problem? everytime that i frost it, it becomes lop-sided with icing pooled all around the cake…delicious, but not much to look at…
beautiful earrings! pick me…my birthday is tomorrow!
:0)
I tried to make rice crispy treats with fruity pebbles and they kind of fell apart because I used margarine instead of butter and they wouldn’t stay together…so we had “fruity cobblestones” or so my husband called them.
four of us got together to make Christmas cookies and then share them around. I was going to make almond roca from my mother’s recipe. I ended up with nothing after 3 hours. 4 failed attempts and 3 pounds of butter later, I still had nothing to share. the girls were gracious and I still went home with peanut butter balls and sugar cookies.