That line about 'baking is therapy' from the food blogger on NPR

I heard this food blogger on WBUR last Tuesday talking about how she thinks baking is therapy, but then she admitted she throws out her failed batches. I could NEVER do that. If I mess up a batch of cookies, I still eat them. Who else actually eats their baking fails instead of tossing them?

3 comments

3 Comments

xena15d ago

Oh man, I totally get this! I burned a whole tray of chocolate chip cookies last month because I got distracted by a phone call. They were basically charcoal discs but I still crunched through three of them with my coffee. My trick is to repurpose the fails. Crumbled burnt cookies make a great topping for yogurt or ice cream. And if a cake collapses, I just call it a "trifle base" and layer it with pudding and fruit. Nobody knows the difference.

wesley_martin4d ago

Hold up, I gotta disagree here. When you mess up a recipe that bad you're just wasting good ingredients and teaching yourself it's okay to half-ass things in the kitchen. Calling a collapsed cake a "trifle base" is just fancy talk for admitting you couldn't follow basic directions.

kaiharris2d ago

Crumbled burnt cookies make a great topping" - that's genius actually. I read somewhere that most professional chefs started out making a ton of mistakes before they got good, it's just part of learning. @xena1 you're right that a little creativity saves a lot of waste, and honestly if someone judges you for turning a mess into something good, that's their problem.