Flubs, Duds and Flops

It’s so easy (and fun) to write about old familiar recipes that I love…ones that I know will always turn out great.  The challenge of writing for a food blog is the trying of new recipes.  The risk!  The danger!  You never really know how they’re going to turn out, and oftentimes they don’t.  In the past week I’ve had two such flubs.  I had such high hopes for both of these recipes, but alas, for various reasons, they didn’t work.

After some serious thought, I came to the conclusion that you might actually be interested in the recipes that failed, so I’m going to share them with you.  I believe it’s good for the soul to confess publicly sometimes.  So here you go….

 

Cinnamon roll muffins…oh how I wanted these to be good.  I so eagerly anticipated biting into one of these and getting my cinnamon roll fix in the form of a muffin.  The flavors were pretty much there, but oh, the grief and sadness.  The texture of the muffin just wasn’t right.  It was dry and it didn’t seem that the muffins rose properly.  I’ve come to the conclusion that my little “easy-bake” oven here on the West Coast runs a little hot and that basically these got overcooked.  Not sure yet as I have not re-made them.  Must give myself time to recover from the loss.  But you, my friends, you should try these.  I got the recipe from Pink Parsley and hers turned out so pretty. Here's the link to the recipe. I want you to have cinnamon roll muffins, so go there and give it a try.  Let me know how yours turn out.

Then there is the saga of the egg-baked potato.  This was another one that I had such high hopes for.  Oh, these were going to be good.  But here’s an instance where my lack of attention to detail totally sabotaged my efforts.

So here’s the deal…you bake some potatoes, you scoop out the insides, you mix that with cheese and sour cream and whatever you love (I used the leftover spinach stuffing from the chicken spanaki) and then you return that to the potato skin, leaving a little well on top and then you crack an egg in there and bake.  Doesn’t that sound good???  Well, it did to me.

 

Well, I couldn’t get the egg white to cook.  The yolk was cooking, but the white was still jiggly (not good eats).  So I kept cooking and cooking and by the time the white was done, the yolk was like hard-boiled.  These were still pretty good, but certainly not what they were supposed to be.  What happened?

Well, I’ll tell you what happened…I made the potatoes ahead of time and let them sit before I added the egg and baked them.  So the potatoes were room temp and the egg was cold from the fridge and well, it took a while for the potato to get hot enough to cook the egg white, and by the time it did, well, all was lost.

But this morning I tried it again and made sure the potato was steaming hot before I cracked the egg into it, and, you guessed it…the thing cooked perfectly in 10 minutes.

Oh, and as a postscript, here’s the part where I am going to tell you how REALLY stupid I can be….at the bottom of the recipe (which ended up on another page) it suggested that you could poach the egg while the potatoes baked and then add the egg at the end so it would cook faster.  I got this recipe from Real Simple. Here's a printable copy the recipe where you can see how pretty their potatoes turned out.  Sigh.

Let this be a lesson to you, people.  Following directions can sometimes be a very helpful thing. 

So now that I’ve brought you up-to-date on my two most recent flops, I hope you’ll try both of them, and wish you much better success that I.