When you don't read the recipe properly............ .

I've really enjoyed reading these posts especially the turning two pages at once posts. So funny. And so reassuring to know others make mistakes. I'm not a great cook although I keep trying. I was like Wendy Craig in Butterflies.

I worked with someone, many years ago, who was newly married. She thought it would be impressive to serve homemade cake the first time her inlaws came to visit.
She had no greaseproof to line her tin so used cling film instead !!!!

I once managed somehow to Double all the booze items in a Christmas make your own mince meat recipe from a newspaper (I -think- it got a bit damp in the kitchen), I have never lived down Dad’s “get you P*$$ed” mince pies”. !!???

ps did you pit the cherries first?
I saw a cherry pitter in a sale recently (the last one) but restrained myself and didn't buy it at £1.50 - should I have splashed out?
I thought it would be one more thing to clutter up the kitchen drawer

try to get a job improving the recipes for Waitrose magazine?

Yes kittylester - they sound yummy.

You would do better than Pippa!

Slimming World have a delicious recipe for Diet Coke Chicken. Not Diet CHERRY Coke Chicken as I once made it. We ate it anyway and it was ok!

I remember when I was in my teens making the mistake of turning over two pages at once and putting 2 tablespoons of salt in my Melting Moments. Even the birds wouldn't eat them.

It has to be really good quality balsamic not the sort of utility most supermarkets sell. If you turn the bottle upside down and it moves like liquid in the bottle, its not the right quality. The good stuff can also be used with quality parmesan cheese.

I once used brown sugar instead of caster sugar when making sweets for Christmas. The mixture didn't set properly, but it was absolutely marvellous as dessert, placed in a glass bowl, then a layer of tinned tangerines on top and whipped cream to top it all off.

Served it on New Year's Eve that year, so we didn't need to feel guilty about how many calories there were in it.

Squiffy could be nice with a burger or salad???

Tomato jam anyone?! We were inundated with tomatoes, so I decided to make chutney. I doubled all the ingredients - but I forgot to double the vinegar . . .

Juani56 my mum makes them & loves them. Did you use non diet (full sugar) lemonade??
My sis made a recipe boo boo with garlic bread (3 bulbs not cloves) and you could smell it at the end of the street ?!!
I like strawberries cooked with a little black pepper, served with steak. While the steak is resting turn the heat down and add the strawberries with a (generous) twist of freshly ground black pepper. Yummy!

Not long after I got married I decided to make some cakes from the Victorian recipe book my mum in law had handed down to me. All went well until it said ' make a hollow in each cake and add a half teaspoon of jam'. Hmmh, I thought, that's a bit odd , but my DH had said it was one of his favourite recipes so I carried on. After tea he said how nice the little cakes had been and where did I get the recipe. I said from his Mum's cookery book and why was he surprised as they were his favourites. I got the book to show him and realised two pages were stuck together so I had half one recipe and half from another! They became a family favourite and I still bake them now.

Used plain flour instead of self raising flour when making rock cakes yesterday.
They lived up to the name of rock cakes !

I just tried to make the 3 ingredient scones (flour, lemonade and whipping cream), oh dear they are horrible (my bad, I expect). I think I would have enjoyed the lemonade with some ice and a slice of lemon and the whipping cream on some strawberries just a tad more..

They were sinful Gabriella - deliciously sinful!

I made fruit flapjack to take to work for my birthday. As I was scaling up the recipe I had to weigh the oats in batches as my weighing scale pan wouldn't fit them all. Th flapjack was particularly good, getting many compliments from colleagues but when I got home I found my scale pan still full of oats. I'd failed to add the last batch! No wonder the flapjack was extra sticky and buttery! Not so much mis-reading as failing to follow correctly, but extremely succesful.

I think it would be absolutely sinful to roast fresh cherries.

A VERY long time ago, in a cookery class in school, I misread the recipe for ginger bread and put in a pint of water instead of two tablespoons. The teacher didn’t understand why my gingerbread didn’t rise when all the other loaves did. By then I had realised my mistake, but kept quiet!

Well, if you gave the resulting concoction to the dog and it gave you the thumbs up then all's well that ends well, kitty!

Oh dear, I think we've all done this, misreading, not sure about roasting cherries but definitely Marsala not Maple SyrupBy the way I love cherries

I like maple syrup but I can’t help suspecting that if you were to roast it, you’d end up with a blackened sticky mess in whatever receptacle you’d roasted it in, and it would take a lot of time and effort to get it all off.
Cherries and Marsala sounds a brilliant combination. You must have known that instinctively kitty

It was so nice I'm doing it again tonight and we rarely do puddings!! And when there are no fresh cherries I shall do it with tinned.

Cherries and maple syrup sounds like a vile combination to me! Marsala is infinitely more appealing.
It would be lovely with pancakes or waffles and ice cream.

The latter, Kitty. And tell the consumers of the ice cream that you had an even better idea than the one in the recipe - which it sounds, I’m no fan of maple syrup.