Recipe disasters..

When I first started work on a cookery magazine we used to test a lot of recipes at weekends. One of the first I tested was a kind of rum-flavoured fritter. The mixture was unbelievably sticky – like kneading half a pound of Bostik – and I kept adding more this and that to try to get a decent consistency. That, after all, was the point of testing the recipes. Eventually, I reckoned it was about right and started deep-frying the "fingers". The first one into the hot oil swelled … and swelled … and swelled until it was nearly the size of a pillow. That particular recipe was never published.

I used to be a very good homebrew beer brewer, and decided to get back into - well - something. We had loads of lovely elder flowers, so i decided to make elder flower champagne. I found a recipe online and followed it to the letter.

Utter disaster! The stuff tasted like vinegar and never got any better. I chucked it all out.

Maybe I'll wait for the berries next time and try elderberry wine.

I'm not bad at baking - and one rainy day when youngest granddaughter came in after school, I thought we'd bake some scones together. She was a bit too liberal when she poured in the 'little bit' of milk, so the mixture was too wet. I thought it wouldn't hurt just to put in a bit more flour...it obviously didn't work, and they turned out heavy and hard. She crowed at me that her 'other gran' was really good at baking and never had disasters like these! No doubt 'other gran' was regaled with my shortcomings and felt very smug (blast her!!!)

Why didn't that come up in bold? Delia's

"*Delia's*"

Delis'a "easy" mushroom risotto - I never remember which is condensed and which is evaporated milk and obviously used the wrong one. Nauseating - even dog turned her nose up at it!