We have all been there, and you know the small kitchen mishap that might mean a spilled ingredient that you did not have a replacement. The burned dinner because of a phone call or being distracted. Reaching outside your culinary skills, winging a new recipe, the wrong size baking pan, that was me tonight. My oven is a disaster because I got sidetracked.
I watched a Gordon Ramsey on Youtube today, on making the perfect sponge cake. He was adamant that you had the grams of the ingredients dialed into exact. Yes, he is correct (He better be, he is a Michelin star chef ). Baking IS a science. I have a lot of respect for the man. He inspired me to venture into my kitchen to make a way that home cooks, you know people without a food scale could make the perfect sponge cake. You can do it average baker and cook!
Back to my oven that I am avoiding right now, yes I cleaned up the worst part of the mess, I am waiting for my electric rates that go down in the late evening to turn on the oven cleaner, I can be responsible at times. I wanted to make a spiced sponge with apples. Sounded great in my head, I had it all laid out, set out to prepare the apples, measured my spices, decided to use rum flavoring instead of vanilla extract; this was going to be delicious! Then it happened. I have two blue pyrex baking pans; one is an 11 x 13, the other is an 11 x 7, does not sound like a significant change, right??? We would be wrong. I was working on a new marinade and was testing it out with chicken that my husband was going to BBQ, which he did, and the marinade is fantastic you should try it, but back to the mishap that shorted me dessert and made my oven a war zone of burnt cake. Sigh…that oven is not going to clean itself, well it is, but with help.
I timed my mixing of the cake batter, so I would have enough time to scrub, rinse, and dry the 11 x 13, 3 Liter pan. Yep, that was my plan. Keyword, plan, funny little word that has such a significant impact if it does not go according to plan. Well, I washed and rinsed the correct pan, then I put it in the drying rack and somewhere, somehow, someway…my brain said nope. I reached into the cabinet and pulled down the smaller pan, proceeded to butter and flour, and pour the batter, anticipating what my new recipe will taste like, wondering if we had french vanilla ice cream, brain still on autopilot. I did mention I need to clean my oven, right? I might also let you know, no, we did not have french vanilla ice cream either. So we all make the little mistakes that add up to a big disaster, so do not beat yourself up, call yourself or your family names, just smile and write notes in the margins of your recipe, I can not tell you what I wrote, this is a family-friendly site.