Baking Disasters

My baking disasters started the weekend before Easter when the Rutherfords and Rachael were coming over for supper. I put together a cheesecake chock-a-block full of cream cheese and sour cream. The recipe said to bake this seemingly 20 pound monstrosity at 250 degrees F., which, on reflection, was probably a tad too low a temperature. I took it out of the oven about five minutes past the one hour mark called for in the cookbook and set it on a rack on the kitchen counter. I loosened and removed the ring around the springform pan and proceeded with kitchen cleanup. I happened to glance up a few minutes later and watched with morbid fascination as a huge crack formed down the center of the cheesecake and the front half oozed off the rack and over the counter edge. I quickly gathered up as much of the molten -lava-like batter that I could hold in two hands and had wild thoughts of reshaping and covering the entire mess with A LOT of cherry topping. The cake had more sense and simply refused to cooperate. It exited the kitchen via the recycling bin.

On Good Friday, I decided to make the Easter dinner dessert well ahead of time and chose the Rocky Road pie recipe from Epicurious.com. Dear God, what was I thinking? Pounds of layered chocolate crumbs, chocolate ice cream, marshmallow and whipping cream, melted Lindt chocolate and whipping cream and toasted walnuts later, I realized this was Death by Fat and Suger. I'd kill the dinner guests. I froze it per recipe instructions and think I will wait till we have a crowd of 200 here before slicing and serving it in tiny slivers. It looked so light, so airy, so mousse-like in the website photo...

Refusing to save myself from myself, I carried on with the baked yeast doughnut recipe that I already had underway. I am an old hand at putting together sweet dough recipes and I found a lovely photo of baked doughnuts on Elliphantom Knit's website. And sweet dough just seems so Eastery. Think of the European Easter breads that are so pretty and so traditional. The doughnuts turned out fairly well but the sugaring process was not as successful as Elliphantom's. Instead of looking and tasting as though they had been dusted by fairies with cinnamon sugar, they tasted as though they had been in a collision with a three ton truck that dropped its sugar load in the process.

On a more positive note, my knitting has vastly improved.