Kitchen catastrophes

In my kitchen adventures I have experienced a few catastrophes thrown in with the successes. One of the funniest of these happened yesterday afternoon when I decided, after chatting with a friend about the caramel apple party favours she was giving out at her approaching nuptials, that all I really wanted in that very moment was some caramel sauce of my own. How hard can it be, I thought. It's just sugar...And maybe butter...And probably some vanilla...and maybe some bourbon or cream? And then, a few clicks of the mouse later I had a recipe for homemade caramel sauce that seemed foolproof. That is until I attempted it. And proved that a fool (like myself) can really mess it up. Instead of a silky, buttery, salty-sweet sauce for dipping apples into I ended up with vinyl. Like cheap Halloween costume vinyl. I could have sooner been making a bustier than a dessert... (Note to self: Whole milk does NOT equal cream when it comes to candy making and is not an appropriate substitute. Buy the blasted cream! Get off the couch! It's worth it.) And then there was the question of how to remove the vinyl I created from the utensils I used to create it. That, it turns out, is not so difficult. Just boil it all in water until the sugar dissolves and you can have your utensils back, vinyl-less.

Another episode of my kitchen catastrophes occurred while working on my raspberry bran muffins. I was low on baking powder so I thought, why not use the same amount in some extra baking soda??? BAD IDEA. I ended up with muffins that tasted like pennies. Copper pennies. METAL pennies. Not so tasty. Professor hubs was kind enough to force one down for solidarity's sake, poor fellow... Since then I have been particularly weary of baking soda in food...