Flop and failures, they happen to all of us.

Last weekend I had three things in one day fail on me. Bob said I must have angered the cooking goddess, I say sh.. happens. Since three in one day is quite a record I decided it was worthy of a post.
Failures and flops are a chance to learn. I try not to throw them away, sometimes they can be used as is or re-purposed into something else !!

You can see in the first photo, a loaf of what was supposed to be cinnamon swirl bread, made in the bread machine.
In this case the bread was still usable as toast. If it had not been I would have made it into bread pudding.
My sister-in-law found a page of trouble shooting for bread machine loaves. Turns out the sunken top means the loaf rose too quickly or too much. The fix is to try 1/4 tsp. less of yeast or 1 to 2 tablespoons more flour. I was very careful with my next loaf and it came out perfectly.
Sometimes the devil IS in the details ;-)

These cookies are a perfect example of the above adage. I have made these chocolate walnut cookies many times. They are supposed to look like this.

Instead they were very flat and too thin. My mistake was to add toasted nuts that were still warm to the batter, this melted the butter, resulting in those very flat cookies. It may sound like a fine line but I could definitely tell the difference. Bob is not so discriminating and was happy to have his own batch of cookies. I made brownies to serve instead.

Over the holiday I made a very nice batch of nougat, it was soft more like divinity. I thought my brother would enough some so I made a batch before his recent visit. Oops.

It was too soft, I was unable to cut it and it was a bit grainy still. I haven't made enough nougat to know exactly what I did wrong. I will try a few adjustments and hope I get it right.
That's really what cooking is all about anyway, trying new things, messing up and figuring it out.
I decided to use the gooey nougat in some way in cupcakes. Frosting, or swirled or directly into the batter were my choices. I went with the easy way and mixed it directly into the batter. I added some almond extract and had some tasty cupcakes !!