Best Laid Plans

Everyone Makes Mistakes

Practice Makes Perfect

I'm sure you have heard these phrases before, I certainly have.  From playing the clarinet in high school, to learning my debits and credits in school or at work, I have had to practice to hone my skills (and I have made mistakes!)  

This is no different when learning about a hobby such as sewing, decorating cakes, or even blogging!

I had this phrase come to life while trying a few new things this week in preparation for the Mr. Fix it Fiance's birthday.  I had a plan of an awesome XBox themed shin-dig, (rather than duplicating the Star Wars birthday from last year).  

I decided that since I had an opportunity to play around with new recipes, I was totally going to try some I had been waiting on... 

That's when it happened, everything went sooo horribly WRONG!   

Here's how:

1.  The Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake Fiasco:

Due the fact that my Mr. Fix it Fiance is not as big of a fan of CAKE and I am, I decided to make him a chocolate chip cookie cake instead (MY FIRST EVER!)  I followed this recipe to a T, except for using a pizza pan.  I don't have one of those, so I just laid out the dough on a regular cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  

Only about twelve minutes latter I smell a burnt smell around the apartment.  Apparently the cookie cake expands WAY more than the size of my cookie sheet.  The edges slid off the sides of the cookie sheet, broke off, and landed in the bottom of my oven.  I had a HUGE mess.  

Okay, so I learned my lesson, next time use the proper utensils that the recipe says to use.  (Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the cookie dough STUCK to the inside of my oven, I was a bit preoccupied with the clean up!)

2.  Flooding Gone Wrong:

I had an AWESOME plan to use the icing from Bake at 350 to decorate the cookie cake (or cookie blob) to look like a Xbox controller.  (ALL her cookies are LOVELY, so why wouldn't I, right?)  

Wrong, .... SO wrong!!

Bake at 350's directions where fantastic, but the icing colors I bought would not turn the white fluffy icing, to black, so I got purple.  Yes, I had to use purple to create a Xbox controller. 

I then was going to use the "flooding" technique to make the controller come to life on the pan, however, after I failed at the outlining, flooding the joysticks, and making the light up buttons look anything like buttons, I gave up.  You can see that mess below:

3.  Icing Plan 2

I used Bake at 350's cookie recipe as well, to make the MOST delicious cut out sugar cookies and held up to being tortured by my icing- capades.

I wanted to make circle cookies to look like the Xbox logo.  By this time, my kitchen smelled BURNT, the icing was hardening and I was already upset about the hideous cake, so I put the logo on the cookies with just two green lines... no flooding.  

Since my Mr. Fix It Fiance would much rather his bake goods have little to no icing, he was happy, but my pride was hurt BIG time!

After having so much trouble, I tweeted Bake at 350 to tell her about my hideous cake/cookie fiasco, she told me:

There, I had a professional telling me that practice makes perfect.  I will certainly be taking these two sayings to heart the next time I attempt a new project or recipe.

Have you had any kitchen mishaps lately?