My Most Legendary Baking “Fail”

I’ve been a self-taught baker for about 5 years now, and through those years many creations of mine have gone in the bin. Naturally, when you attempt something (especially baking!) there will inevitably be times when things just don’t pan out (pun intended) 😄

Today, I set out to bake the banana walnut bread from my Williams Sonoma Muffins & Quick Bread cookbook. I think I’m pretty good at this point at judging recipes and converting them into metric measurements, but this whole misadventure had nothing to do with the recipe. It all began when I severely overestimated how much batter I could put in my loaf pan (the recipe even said it makes two loaves )

I started mixing, making adjustments where I felt like, and poured the batter into the loaf pan… filling it all the way to the top (mistake #2). I placed it in the oven, and 25 seconds later by some divine intervention I thought, “I should put a baking sheet under the pan.”

Thank God I did! After 20 minutes, the batter started spilling over the side. Afraid that it would burn, I scraped it off the sheet and let it keep baking for another 5 minutes.

After more spillage, my baker instincts kicked in and I quickly put the brakes on the banana bread train. I took the barely baked bread out of the oven, quickly buttered my muffin pans, and with an ice cream scoop I transferred all of the batter to the new baking vessel (I’m laughing as I write this ). I even said to myself, “this feels so wrong.” It was a glorious and hilarious mess.

Back into the oven, I make my best guess for 15 minutes. To my amazement, the muffins actually ended up tasting wonderful! They look like they’ve been through being a quarter baked, scooped out and rebaked in a new pan, definitely. But, I salvaged almost all the batter. Only a tiny bit of batter went to waste from the spilling, and now I have delicious muffins and a ridiculous story

Admittedly, if I had to throw away the whole thing, I would have been a little upset because it was a lot of food. But, I’m quite proud of my ability to adapt and make the best of what I could have viewed as a frustrating situation. That ability is not something that is innate, but rather something I had to develop and practice. And trust me, a lot of that practice occurred in the kitchen!

Thank you for reading and I hope you also got a good laugh out of this! Have a wonderful weekend, talk soon