Pintrest Lied to Me

Maybe some of you have seen the popular brownie pin?

Brownie, caramel, and pretzels

It makes it look soooo easy. Well... it isn't. I'm sure I messed up somewhere.. I may even know where. sadly it doesn't even taste good. Which definitely means it qualifies as a baking failure! *trumpets*

Step One: Glace at the picture provided on Pintrest. Decide it looks so easy even you could do it. Get ingredients needed out and display on counter. 

 Continue to assume that this will be easy and soon you will have delicious pretzel caramel brownies!

Step Two: Read the instructions and start the brownie mix part:

(since I live in Colorado it is wise to follow the "high altitude" instructions. which call for an additional 1/2 cup flour and 1/3 cup of water instead of 1/4)

Step Three: Pour the batter in the greased pan, add the pretzels (this took forever) and then the caramel. - This has to be where I screwed up. I think the pretzels were supposed to go first. and I may have used too much caramel? not sure...

Step Four: Set the oven at 350 and place the brownies in for 25 - 36 min (we ended up doing 36 minutes - not that it helped)

Step Five: Take them out of the oven, assuming they are supposed to look like that. But they're not. 

Step Six: Scoop some out and hope that it tastes good... but it doesn't. The pretzel are mushy and the brownie is just gross. Where did the caramel go? 

Step Seven: Vow to never ruin perfectly good brownie mix again, or to trust pintrest. Evil evil pintrest.

So there you have it, I fail again. Don't worry we didn't need those extra calories anyway. I'll be frying up some chicken tonight cross your fingers for me. ^^ One of these days I'll be able to post about a "baking success"!!

Baking Failures

So I decided to make chocolate chip cookies. yay! who doesn't love chocolate chip cookies? and it's possibly one of the easiest recipes to make. how could this go wrong??

First I used the nestle toll house chocolate chip cookie recipe because I firmly believe that one is the best. the secret? 2 sticks of butter. At least that's what I believe it to be. cookies that use anything but butter usually taste weird to me. so put away that *shudder* margarine. and place that can of crisco back in your cupboard!

Oven: 375 degrees... check!

Ingredients (this is when I decide that I only want "30" cookies instead of "60". and thus my downfall begins)

• 1 cup 2 tbs flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 stick of BUTTER
• 6 tbs of brown sugar
• 6 tbs of granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1 lg egg
• 1 cup chocolate chips 

Step one: fail completely at doing the math for halving the recipe ( ^ it's halved up there). I converted 3/4 cup brown sugar and granulates sugar into 12 Tbs each. then proceeded to add 12 tbs to my mixer. not 6. Now a sane person would think "oh well, I'll just double the flour, baking soda, and salt and take another stick of butter out". (I had already mixed the flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl) but I decided to scoop out what I thought was 6 tbs of white and brown sugar. 

oops!

I shrug my shoulders and move on to step 2.

Step two: follow the recipe and mix everything up. Add chocolate chips. and since I have a love for Ghirardelli Chocolate I added their milk chocolate chips. and ate a few. so what?

this batter smelled wonderful. it tasted wonderful (yes I know you're not supposed to taste it) but I could tell that there was something off. quite possibly too much brown sugar. hmm.. I wonder why?

 Step Three: with hope and joy lovingly place 12 gigantic lumps of cookie dough onto a baking pan and slide them into the oven. set the timer to 10 minutes... just in case.

Step Four: weep at your failure and eat the rest of the Ghirardelli chocolate chips by themselves.

They were chewy and thin and gross. my husband ate 4 before I could toss them out. I picked a few of the melty chocolate chips out to eat, because why waste chocolate? and now time for Game of Thrones. I'll make cheese/meat/and tomato dip in our tiny crockpot and as long as my cooking curse doesn't affect (effect?) that too we should have at least that to snack on! 

On a side note I purchased 11 Milky way bars to make Pioneer Woman's Milky way cake (though I'll be using butter of course) for a cookout this Saturday. wish me luck! I'm going to need it. 

A link to the recipe on Pioneer Woman's website:

The Pioneer Woman's Milky Way Cake Recipe