thebigfatnoodle

Kitchen Disasters

Today was one of those catastrophic days in the kitchen when the highs were sky high and the lows were, well, unbelievably bad 🙂 I should be crying into my mixing bowl right now but I can’t, because even though today was a bit of a disaster, I still had a ball. Spending Sunday tinkering around in the kitchen, even with disastrous results, was exactly what I wanted to do this weekend so I still had fun!

I’m always one for getting bad news out of the way first so here’s what happened…

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a lot about whoopie pie making. I even went out and bought a special baking tray for making whoopie pies, which came with a recipe book. However, most of the recipes in it call for ‘shortening’, which I simply couldn’t find in the supermarket so yesterday, I found a recipe for whoopie pies in the Daily Mail.

It all started seemingly well, with my only observation being that this was one super sticky chocolate batter.

So far, so good...

Unfortunately, it all went downhill after that. I followed that recipe to the T but I must have like super powerful baking powder/soda because my whoopie pies turned out to be monsters that simply wouldn’t stop rising in the oven! I swear to God, they were HUGE!

Batch one: Using 2 tablespoon of batter. They turned out monstrously huge, in fact, came out more like muffins!

So the recipe said that there would be enough batter to make 6 whoopie pies, well, I filled my tray and I still had at least half a bowl full of batter. So after baking this first lot, I thought I’d spoon half the amount of batter onto the tray (same batter mixture though) and hoped that would mean smaller, less high whoopie pies…

Batch 2 (same batter), just half the amount. WTF!?! Same bloody monstrously huge cakes emerge!

Hmm, these look amazing: Daily mail chocolate whoopie pie recipe here.

Anyway, (on the left) this is the picture of whoopie pies on the Daily Mail webpage and (on the right) that is what mine looks like…, see any resemblance?? 🙂

Hmmm.... not quite like the Daily Mail website picture, is it?

The only solution I can think of is that I’m going to have to find some way of convincing my husband to go back to the Stateside Candy & Co shop we just went to recently (read about that story here). I know they sell shortening there. What do you reckon my chances are of that!?!!

BTW, my whoopie pies actually taste quite nice, they just don’t look it. In the end, because of the disastrous results, I didn’t even bother trying to make the filling mixture, and I’m calling my batch whoopsies instead of whoopies; rather fitting, don’t you think?

We ate ours with a layer of dulce de leche and a banana cream (fresh banana squished with 2 tablespoons of clotted cream). I didn’t show the banana cream because, well, it really didn’t look that nice oozing out of my whoopsies. Tasted great though, hehehe 🙂

I’m not ready to admit defeat though. As soon as I can get my hands on some shortening, I will be attempting to make whoopie pies again!

As for the good part of today? Well, I tried my hand at making pizza dough from scratch and it was an overwhelming success! More importantly, I LOVE the feel of dough and I can’t wait to make another batch, just because of that one second thrill when you have to ‘punch’ this great big ball of squidgyness 🙂

So, I’ll be posting pictures of our home-made pizzas tomorrow. Meantime, if you fancy sharing any of your own kitchen disasters, I’m all ears 🙂

Have a great week ahead.

Lots of love

thebigfatnoodle