Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Chilled Grapefruit-Caramel Meringue Pie

This recipe appeared in Food & Wine a couple of years ago, and I decided to make it for New Year's Eve. It took hours, literally, but it was fabulous!

My baking is almost always a failure.

I love Mrs. Rowe's!! We went there all the time when I was in college in the Shenandoah Valley.

My triumph was a Gianduia Chocolate Mousse cake (Gourmet, Feb. 1998) I made for a roomie's birthday many years ago-- I still have dreams about it!

Most triumphant and most disastrous - the first thing I ever baked was a complete victory for me, despite it being very nearly a disaster. When I was 7 or 8, I decided to make a devil’s food cake out of my grandmother's recipe box. I made the whole thing myself, while she sat at the kitchen table playing cards, drinking coffee, and when I pulled it out of the oven, so excited and proud, it was as flat as a pancake. I forgot to use a single egg. The cake tasted wonderful, but looked just terrible. My grandmother ate it and told me it was wonderful.

as i'm a new baker, my list of horrible experiences is pretty short. but two months ago i tried to make snickerdoodle muffins. i cleaned my stove, knobs included, the night before and my damn oven was set between broil and bake....which led to overbaked tops and underbaked bottoms. they looked almost perfect but were a gooey mess inside. grr

I love southern food, including of course, pies.

I once made an apple pie that turned out very well. I made an awesome chocolate cake with sour cream in the mix, but I lost the recipe :(

My friend and I wanted to try out an Baked Alaskan with chocolate pound cake and strawberry ice cream. The pound cake turned out pretty tasty, then came the meringue. We put the egg whites in but forgot to cut the recipe by a 1/4 like we needed to so added WAY too much sugar to the egg whites. The meringue still LOOKED ok but when we tasted it it was gritty and made you think your teeth were going to fall out. Needless to say we ended up just having pound cake and ice cream with some whipped cream that we already had in the fridge.

My most triumphant baking success occurred about two years ago when my office hired me to make a birthday cake for our CEO. Now I know that may not sound particularly daunting, but it needs to be said that at that time, I worked a very stressful job in the pressure-filled entertainment industry, with the boss from hell. If anyone has seen The Devil Wears Prada, my boss could have played Meryl Streep's character. Seriously. However, if that wasn't enough pressure, she also happened to be an excellent cook with exquisite taste in everything. Naturally all these things combined made me a little nervous. But when she requested a chocolate cake, I knew I had it in the bag. So I pulled out my most trusted and favorite chocolate cake recipe ever - Epicurious' Chocolate Ganache cake (seriously, I've never found another recipe that tops it, and believe me, I've tested many) - used super high-quality ingredients, triple-checked every single step of the recipe while making it, and even made dark & white chocolate covered strawberries to garnish. Oh, and I prayed. Hard. Anyway, it blew them away. My boss loved it, the rest of the office raved about it, and all of them were amazed I could bake like that. I, of course, told them it was nothing and that I just whipped it up when I had a few free minutes. :)

Best - making chocolate burbon pecan pie after having a delicious slice down south - mine was not as good as the original, but close

Worst - moving into my first apartment I did not realize the oven knob was not zeroed - I ended up cooking something at 450 instead of 350 - needless to say smoke ensued

My biggest triumph was the first time I made a yeast bread (brioche)! It wasn't as hard or intimidating as I thought it was going to be, but I was so proud of myself!

I pretty much perfected Mama Dip's Pecan Pie!

I made Julia Child's rustic apple tart for my wife and it was a huge success. She's been bugging me to make her another one.

worst disaster = blackberry pie face down on the oven door. i could have cried. instead, i made another pie.

I attempted to add diced peaches, cooked down into almost a puree, to a boiled icing for the in-between layers of a cake. No matter how hard I tried I could not get the frosting and puree to emulsify, leading to a chunky mess. The cake (with plain peaches between the layers) was still delicious, but i will be careful with my experimenting.

One of my best recent baking moments was last Christmas- my inner recessionista invited some friends over to make cookies- we went with Mocha cookies. They were delicious and a great way to spend an evening with friends!

I have finaly conquered my grandmother's chocolate cream pie. I still can't get the crust right though

My best: a 12 layer cake I made a couple of month's ago for a friend's engagement party. Think Smith Island cake, except with white almond cake, raspberry jam and whipped cream filling, and Swiss meringue buttercream frosting.

My failure: French Bread. Somehow they didn't rise at all in the oven, and i had two flat puddles with some painted egg streaks in the middle. I never attempted french bread again.

I made a white chocolate raspberry cheesecake for my daughter's birthday - all the ingredients cost $40!, but it turned out perfect.

My first and last attempt at a double layer birthday carrot cake many years ago... looked great but it was hard as rock, couldn't even slice it, perfect for a door stopper! When I bring a dessert to a potluck or gathering, everyone asks me until now if I baked it or if it's store bought!

worst baking disaster: a banana bread that was completely raw in the middle because my then room mate and i used the wrong sized pan. we ended up cutting out the middle and turning it into a bundt cake.

I always like it when I can bake something a bit different. Buttermilk pie was a surprise as was vinegar pie. Splitting a pound cake recipe so each slice was part chocolate pound cake and part lemon pound cake means I never have to decide which to bake. I'll probably have to get this cookbook anyway since my MIL's maiden name was Mildred Rowe and her cooking is best not remembered.

I was baking a cake, I pulled it out of the oven to check for doneness. I poked it with a pick and smoke started coming out of the whole. I stared in amazement and finally realized I sat it on a hot electric burner. I still laught to this day about the smoking cake.

My first loaf of brioche. A revelation.

My baking catastrophe was at the age of 8 when I accidentally got the sugar and salt bins confused when I was making a cake. I've gotten a bit better since then.

My most horrible baking experience happens to involve a red velvet box mix I was baking for my dad's birthday. First the bag split when I tried to open it and got red dust everywhere, then my batter over flowed everywhere in the oven causing another great red mess and no cake! Poo Dad!

I love to bake and have had my share of successes and failures. My latest success was a blueberry pie! I used balsamic vinegar in place of the lemon and ground thyme (just a teeny bit). Another big favorite was a peach pie I made and I added a bunch of ripe plums which needed using up. It gave it a lovely color and punched up the taste beautifully. Baking failures? I think I choose not to remember them!

My husband's the cook, I'm the baker. A match made in gastronomic heaven, much to our waistbands' chagrin.

My worst baking disaster? Anything from the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. I've tried multiple items, and nothing ever came out. Looking at their forums, a lot of other people had the same problem. I generally have great success with Cook's Illustrated but for some reason the ATK recipes just do not work well, or I picked the wrong ones (devil's food cake should not be this difficult!)

I think my favorite is my chocolate raspberry bar cookies - they're simply amazing!

Amy
Baking and Mistaking

Success: I believe I have perfected Challah. It is the only bread to which I can apply changes with a very good sense of what the outcomes will be. This includes fermentation times, flours, sugars, and shapes. Even my no-knead bread is volatile, puffy and holey one time and dense and chewy the next. I don’t get it.

Failure: I made some oatmeal muffins (ugh, I tried to find a link to my regular recipe and couldn’t.. +fail now) and forgot the flour. So it was individual tasty servings of baked oatmeal, nice with some cream (or steamed milk, one of the ways a good cappuccino machine spoils you) but muffins they were not.

Most of my baking efforts are triumphs, but there have been quite a few disasters in the mix as well...

Baking disaster: In highschool I auctioned off 2 homemade pies for a school fundraiser. I made my grandmother's mile high apple pie recipe, complete with slicing the apples super thin and placing them in a decorative pattern on top. I completely forgot to add sugar! The winners ended up with two storebought pies instead.

Baking triumph: I recently made a banana cake with coconut cream cheese frosting in a kitchen with absolutely no measuring equipment, no teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, nothing. I measured everything by sight. It was delicious!

I was making a chocolate pound cake for my brother's birthday this spring. It was a cake recipe I've made many, many times with great success.

The batter was beautiful. Thick and creamy but once in the oven it started to rise and rise and rise. Then it collapsed. So I trashed it and started over.

The second cake did the same thing. Into the trash it went. I was beside myself.

Was it bad eggs, bad flour, bad butter or what? So I had a cocktail and went to bed.

Woke up in the middle of the night with the revelation that maybe, just maybe it WAS the flour.

Sure enough, the bag of plain flour I'd grabbed at the grocery store the day before, wasn't plain at all and I'd made two cakes with self-rising flour.

Off to store at 7 a.m. for more eggs, butter and PLAIN flour for cake number 3 and it was the perfect pound cake like the ones I'd always baked.

Flopping THREE of my grandma's 7-Up Pound Cakes, an incident that is now so delicately referred to by my mother as 7-Up Ton Cake Day.

zebra cheesecake... success

I'd love this

Baking my Grandma's lemon pie and having people think that she had made it...a triumph!

Am I the only person who feels like they don't fall exclusively into the baker or cook categories? I mean, I bake AND I cook, and I do BOTH with varying levels of success. Don't feel like I'm better at one.. and they have very different measures of accomplishment, IMHO.

Anyway - been baking some blondie bars lately that come out very well for the ease of effort. Something magical happens when you melt a stick of butter and stir brown sugar into it. Something magical indeed.

Making monkey bread with my mom...on the grill. Don't even ask. It was NOT a success.

I considered it a great triumph any time I made a birthday cake that made one of my daughters happy.

Does it count as success or failure when all the chocolate chip cookies run together on the tray, creating one giant MEGA-COOKIE?

I'm generally a good baker, but one 4th of July I was trying to make a pineapple-chile cheesecake. I got rushed and distracted and instead of 2 TEASPOONS of chile-in-adobo, I put in 2 heaping tablespoons.

Luckily, my family likes the hot stuff, and they thought it was great. I, however, was mortified.

I considered it a triumph when I made a successful chocolate souffle. They're supposed to be hard, right? Maybe it was just beginner's luck :)

Pie is always a triumph, too - it's hard to go wrong with butter, fruit, and sugar.

After reading Julia Child's biography recently I was inspired to try a bunch of recipes from her cookbooks. Everything I cooked turned out great, but when I tried to bake croissants they were flat, dense and mostly tasted like freezer. And they took two days to make... It was tragic.

Best: my first secret-family-recipe vanilla pound cake. Perfect. Ditto with grandma's pie crust, those always turn out flakey and delicious.
Worst: I haven't even dared try my mom's sugar cream pie and I'm putting it here. I've never seen anyone pull it off on the first go-around; it will probably be a runny mess.

(Hmmm... I'm starting to think maybe it's not my baking prowess but the generations of women who perfected these recipes?)

My first successful banana-cream pie......a great moment.

My greatest baking success is yet to happen, but my favorite success so far would be the dulce de leche cake (with dulce de leche buttercream!) I made for my cousin's birthday. Delicious!

That would be a tossup between the chocolate chip cookies forgotten in the oven and turned into beautiful charcoal briquettes or the gluten-free sourdough bread attempt that was rock solid on the inside and gushy pudding on the inside!

I'm a baker, but the first time I ever made a pie (pumpkin), I was at a friend's house in Laurel Canyon in L.A. and we made them together. I had never transported a pie before and put it on the front seat of my car to take it to my Mom's for Thanksgiving. As you can imagine, as I navigated the twists and turns, my pie slid between the seat and the passenger door. I kind of slopped it back into the pan and camouflaged it with whipped cream. I had traces of that pie in my car for a year.

My most triumphant baking success was a roasted pear pie. It vanished in minutes.

Hamantaschen. I am not Jewish, but a few friends were having a Purim party and I offered to make it. I used a recipe from a co-worker's mother and everyone loved it! They beg me to make it all the time!

I made rugelach with ground cumin instead of cinnamon - I had a cold at the time and didn't notice that they didn't smell right. The taste wasn't too bad but a little bizarre.

I also had a Pyrex pie plate explode. In the oven while browning the meringue of a lemon meringue pie. It had a crack in it which was "tiny" so I used it anyways. Miraculously the crust held the pie together, which was eaten gingerly by my guests. Tasted great!

Lemon meringue pie has always been a disaster for me. It all started when I was trying to clean out my kitchen before moving to grad school. I decided to make the pie with molasses instead of sugar, yuck! That instance completely jinxed all future attempts at this pie.

biggest success -- tiny blueberry pies?

Homemade bagels from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice book. They came out so good, friends have told me I should open my own bagel shop.

epic fail -- my grandfather's famous pumpkin pie for a large crowd at a remote cabin on the pacific. Thanksgiving morning -- there is no ginger. I leave, making my way up and down the coast until I find someplace both open and stocked. Returned and baked pies. Unfortunately, was so concerned about making sure that ginger was appropriately added that I forgot to include the sugar...

I've been cooking since I'm ten but my first real baking attempt was Brownies from a Home Ec Betty Crocker booklet and it was a wonderful experience and I've never looked back since. I love to cook but baking is a passion,

The first time a friend and I attempted to make a pie (we were probably 10) we somehow got the measurements confused and used an ENTIRE block of crisco in the recipe (over twice the amount we were supposed to use!). The "crust" was pretty much a mound of grease and we had to scrap the entire project. So disappointing!

My recent failure was a simple butter cake baked hastily in a crummy little apartment oven. I'm not sure if my conversion wasn't correct (I wanted to halve the recipe in hopes of just one layer) and the oven heating element definitely wasn't quite right--whatever the factors, I ended up with cake burnt on the bottom and edges, but not quite cooked in the middle.

Thankfully, I was able to cut a few decent cubes out of the un-burnt, but fully-cooked portions. They were just right with ice cream and fresh fruit!

my best baking success has been making a three-layer chiffon cake w/ fresh mango filling (the kind you eat from asian bakeries). phew!

Abject disaster: Ile Flottante. I'd just started taking French, in middle school and it was from Julia Child's "The Way to Cook". I was totally entranced by the picture of billowing egg whites, and by the fact the recipe required 12 (12!!!) eggs. Too bad I didn't understand the principles behind successfully beating egg whites. After three cartons of eggs, I decided to call it a day. Note to self: half-congealed egg whites do NOT go down the sink very well!

More successful: pistachio shortbread.

I messed up a cake mix many years ago...added too much water!

Thankfully, it's been a long time since I had any baking disasters :)

When I was 16 or 17, I had some friends coming over for a Valentine's Day party, including a boy I had a crush on. I baked a heart-shaped cake, but when I put the layers together, the top started to crack. I tried to cover it with more frosting, but the crack got bigger and bigger till the whole cake just broke in half. We ended up with "broken heart" cake, I guess. Thanks for the interesting offer!

most disastrous was trying to make an angel food from scratch and adding fruit into the batter. turned into unappetizing blueish gloop that ended up all over my oven. i'm better with cookies!

I have told this story many times:

A few years ago, for Valentine's Day, I wanted to bake a pound cake for my SO (his favorite). Luckily, I decided to do a few test runs, in the hope that I'd tweak a few recipes into My Perfect Pound Cake. The makings of the first cake smelled great, was a beautiful creamy yellow color, and snuggled into the loaf pan just so. Since the recipe specified a 45-minute baking time, I shut the oven door and went into my room to do some work. 30 minutes later, I decided to get a glass of water -- and check on the cake, just in case.

Thin wisps of black smoke were curling out of the oven.

Now, keep in mind that in those days, I was still living in the student apartments in college, which were well equipped with many, many smoke detectors, fire alarms, and sprinklers. Last time a sprinkler had gone off in the building, that entire apartment had been covered in two inches of water -- and the apartment below suffered some damage as well. It was spring semester, senior year. I was not going to let this happen. So, I ran around the floor like a lunatic, collecting fans and shuttling them back to the room, opening all the windows I could find, doing anything possible to filter out the smoke. A few hours later, crisis averted, I passed out (it was 3 a.m. by then -- I keep fairly weird hours) and had completely forgotten that the 'cake' was still in the oven.

The next afternoon, I walked into the kitchen and cracked open the door to take a peek. Molten cake...everywhere. All over the oven walls, along the racks, everywhere. The cake had imploded. Burnt butter and sugar smells invaded the kitchen. I quickly shut the door again.

It took me three days to finally get it together and clean out that oven, and it took forever. Needless to say, I decided on a different Valentine's Day present.

That all said, I wish you the very best of luck. You are much braver than I am, and I'm sure I'm among many who look forward to your posts!

When I was a teenager, about 15, I had plans of being a baker. I would bake every day; I loved it!!

My biggest success was my Crocenbouche! I made all of the cream puffs (chou paste), filled them all with whipped cream and made a magnificent tower (stuck together with hot sugar) all finished off with a pouring of hot, home made caramel!

I was so proud and my family was really happy too lol They were able to eat all of my successes!!

Thanks for a great giveaway!

success: a wonderful and very lemon-y irish tea cake.

It's a little pathetic but my biggest baking success was baking bread pudding - which you can't really mess up!

I made abbracci--from your site even, and made them too early in the morning. For a birthday party. With baking soda instead of baking powder. Blech!

My first batch of falafel (taamaya) turned out so horrible, I had to pitch the whole thing and I was so miserable! It sucked because I had planned this huge dinner for my husband who is Egyptian, and thought I could handle it. I remember him telling me "even my sister can't make this dish!" as he tried to make me feel better. I still can't make authentic falafel.

My biggest baking disaster came when I was 15 and I told my family I was going to cook them all dinner. I selected blueberry grunt for dessert but the balls of dough were completely raw and my blueberries were burnt.

Biggest disaster was cream puffs when I was about 13. Inedible. But I've also left out the sugar in a few cakes and dropped a few cakes as well. Luckily my successes outnumber my failures.

Making my first Lemon Chess Pie...Took it to a friends house warming, a huge hit!

my first chocolate souffle, turned out perfect.

My sad baking disaster was in Christmas 2006.
I LOVE baking cookies and little pastries and things, and decided to hold a Christmas dessert party for all my college friends to get together, the first time we had done since graduating in June 06.
I baked straight from the morning and everything was beautiful.... madeleines, little shortbreads sandwiched with lemon cream (in stars of david for our jewish friend!), warm apple crumble with custard, chocolate crinkle cookies from my childhood, chocolate molleaux with a recipe from an old french lady I lived with for a few months...
But then ONE FRIEND asked the night before if there would be PIE. And without thinking, I said of course!
Little did I know that making pie pastry is not something that can be mastered in thirty minutes. In the end, in tears, I simply smashed little balls of what I had thought would turn out as pretty straightforward pie pastry dough into the pie tin, because I could not for the life of me get the pastry into the pie tine without the beautiful round falling in upon itself. It tasted horrible, friend who asked for pie was disappointed, and three years later I still have not attempted a pie since. I think it's about time I get over the trauma, Mrs. Rowe sounds like she could help.

I decided to master my grandmom's apple pie while I was pregnant. I must have eaten three pies a week! 26 years later, I still make apple pie for his birthday!

I am always looking for Key Lime Pie.

The worst was when I forgot to add the sugar to pumpkin pie. The funny part is that my son-in-law did the same thing a week later!

i am both an excellent cook and a good baker. the trick is that baking is an exact science; measurements must be precise and steps followed exactly. most people who enjoy cooking feel that they can make substitutions - add a dash of this, double the quantity of that. this results in disaster. if you follow the recipe for pie, bread, or desserts as they are written, it will turn out properly.

Biggest triumph--my husband's 40th birthday cake. I had never made a "celebration" layer cake and stupidly chose a cake everyone hailed as unforgettable, but really unforgiving for the poor soul making it as the cake is delicate and NEVER turned out of pans without crumbling a bit. I researched EVERY possibility for turning out complete cakes, evaluated the methods, and the cakes were picture perfect and insanely delicious.

Biggest flop--Five minutes after putting a cheesecake in the oven, noticing that all the sugar that was supposed to go into the cake was still sitting in a measuring cup on the counter. Oops.

Some people call my Chocolate Amaretto Cheesecake a triumph. It is pretty good!

My greatest success was baking an apple pie as good as my Mom's.

just made a double chocolate cheesecake yummy

Blueberry and Cherry 4th of July Flag crumble. -Beautiful and delicious

My best and worst combined -- making a chocolate whipped cream cake for my husband's birthday just after we were married. The phone rang and when I returned from answering it the icing which was whipping cream that was whipping with sugar, cocoa, and vanilla in the mixer, had turned to butter. Chocolate butter is good -- but not for an icing!

I tried to make a strawberry cake twice. The first time it was perfect. The second time I beat the batter too long and it didn't rise much and it was too dense and tough. I threw it away without icing it.

I had pie at Mrs. Rowe's when my sister was in college in that area. It was beyond delicious so I'd love to win this!

I'm actually better at baking than cooking but I have to follow the recipe. I tried to recreate my mom's buttercream icing from memory and I overbeat it or something because it was a running mess allover the cake and never sat up. Thankfully I made it work another time.

My biggest baking disaster was when I was 10 yrs old and made cinnamon rolls for my family before I left for Disneyland with a friend. The rolls turned out fine. It was the garnish that did me in. I had made a breakfast tray that I put the rolls on with coffee and a few geraniums in a small vase and left in my parents' room. My parents were pretty surprised by the gesture, specifically because the rolls were covered with ants from the geraniums! I'm teased to this day about washing my garnishes before I put them on the plate.

I have a triumphant baking experience every holiday. My bf's family (like mine) has pie at all family gatherings, but (unlike mine) they buy their pies from a store. I despise store-bought pie, so I volunteered (kindly, so as not to reveal my ulterior motives) to make the pie from now on. First, it was an amazing apple pie overflowing with applies and covered in crumb topping. Then a divine, unbeatable chocolate cream pie. Lemon tart and banana cream pie followed. I think they like each one more than the last, and have realized that homemade pie is where it's at (and if a guest brings it, they still don't have to bake!).

While I am a pretty good baker, the best stories are always the catastrophes. I'll always remember the time in high school when my friends and I were baking a chocolate bombe that used both bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate. Both chocolates had been chopped into chunks, but someone had accidentally mixed the two together, and we resorted to tasting each one to sort them out. Of course, none of us had very developed tastes for bitterness at the time, so all you heard was, "Sweetened. Sweetened. Aghh, unsweetened!"

Never try to bake a pie in a 3 inch deep casserole dish. Although the fruit mush was tasty poured over vanilla ice cream, it was no where near the Lucious Blueberry Peach Pie I had envisioned. I guess that's what happens when you have to make do on vacation!

I made my first peach pie using joe pastry technique- and it turned out pretty well, I was quite proud of myself. I hated paula deens carmel cake-blah i wanted to throw the damn thing out but my husband kept nibbling on it.

We don't have birthday cakes in our house -- we have pie. This year I got an apple-pear gallette with carmel sauce and I finally made a successful rasbpberry tart for my husband. Our 18-year-old son can make a mean cobbler. I would love to let him pick his birthday treat from this great book!

sea salt brownies where i modified the recipe a little the second time i made them (less sugar here, more salt there, a little less butter) and they were better than the originals. usually when i substitute or modify in baking, its a disaster.

Most triumphant success was baking the Black Forest Chocolate Cookies from the Baked cookbook (recipe also featured on SE). They are to date the best cookies I have ever had - even my father, not one to make such claims lightly, agreed.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2008/11/baked-black-forest-chocolate-cookies-recipe.html

my triumph is... a perfect strawberry cake that was moist and delicious

My first pie and pie crust from scratch was actually my biggest triumph. Mostly the crust!

My biggest baking disaster would have to be a few years ago, Christmas. I had made a cheesecake that turned out a little rough. To try and cover it up and make it look better, I melted down some chocolate to give it a little top coating. I did not soften the chocolate enough before applying it and I ended up with chocolate armored cheesecake. Tasty, but we had to work for it!

Greatest success: mom's apple pie.
Greatest disaster: blackbery pie.....more like blackberry soup with crust.
Greatest pie desire: Lemon Icebox Pie.

I'm in love with all southern foods, so this book looks amazing!

chocolate derby pie

Just made my first strawberry/ruhbarb pie and everyone loved it. Less succesful, I've learned, as much as I love it, you CAN add too much almond extract.

Olive Oil Cake. It was supposed to be like a citrus coffee cake, but turned into a pancake flat cake, hard and tasted like old olives. The glaze was a lime and lemon glaze. The glaze was too tart and tasted like how home depot smells.

Very successful peach pie, very not successful strawberry pie.. both made at the same time.

I consider it a personal success when my very skilled baker-friends share THEIR delicious successes with me. I can't even do slice-n-bake cookies well.

My pie-making experiences represent both disaster and success. My father's favorite pie is lemon meringue and I make it twice a year for his birthday and Father's Day. One year, distracted by a phone converation, I undercooked the custard filling and ended up with a soupy, lemony liquid that run out from under the meringue like it was being chased. Every year since has been a success now that I've learned never to talk on the phone when making a pie.

I just started baking pies last year and after a couple of successful attempts with apple and strawberry-rhubarb decided to have some girlfriends over to watch "Waitress" and try out a pecan pie. After making the pie from scratch, I was delighted to open the oven door and see it glistening in perfection. Unfortunately, my grace lapsed and I managed to fling the pie across the kitchen floor as I pulled it out. Instead of bursting into tears, which I would've done a few years back, I giggled, grabbed my camera, took a picture of the pecans strewn across the floor, carried what remained of the pie up to my roommate, who happily ate it for dinner, and started over again. Another pie was successfully pulled out of the oven in time to cool and be enjoyed by my girlfriends.

Alas, my biggest triumph and worst disaster occurred on the same day. I get teary thinking of the gorgeous black and white cake (like a b/w cookie, but huge) that I helped my mom make...and just as it was about to be served to the birthday boy (my dad) she dripped and dropped it, frosting-side down. This cake was a goner. Oh my god, I think I am going to cry just thinking about it. Winning this book would definitely help.

most disastrous: tried to do a three tier meringue-pudding combo thing...the meringues were so sticky and not edible!

success: almost everything else I've made (dessert-wise) has been pretty good eating, if not good-looking!

The most memoriable/successful baking is always the one that just came out of the oven last. In my case it is the brownines that are cooling on the kitchen table.

Best - brownie chunk cheesecake!

ina garten's outrageous brownies - not particularly challenging, but so delicious...i've never gotten more compliments and it was my first "from scratch" baking endeavor.

I thought I had come up with the theory that there are cooks and bakers! I'm definitely a cook, not a baker. I've had so many disasters it's hard to think of the worst. My bread is so bad I've considered using it to build a shed. I did make a wonderful lemon-curd cheesecake one time, and
@corinne, I have a foolproof (has to be for me) chess pie recipe. Tastes great and comes out perfect every time!

I started making fudge a few years ago for the holidays and have had several really successful batches.

My biggest baking foul up was with a key lime pie. My first attempt I used egg whites instead of egg yolks and got 2 quite messy unpleasant tasting pies out of one recipe! It was a disaster, but my good natured boyfriend at the time put on a brave face and got through a whole piece before I found out how horrible it was. I knew then he was a real catch. We're happily married 4 years now (and I make a great keylime pie!).

baking success- almond cake at an outdoor movie. friends were reaching over and grabbing handfuls.

attempting to back cookies in a dorm oven i was completely unaware of just how much the temperature would differ between racks. the bottom tray cooked in way less time than it was supposed to and burned. the top was still raw. i had to toss the bottom and leave the top in for a few mins more. it still tasted slightly of burnt cookie from being in the oven with the other tray. *sigh*

I bake a lot, and I've adapted pretty well to high altitude baking, but recently a pound cake recipe went horribly wrong. It was a recipe I'd make a number of times before, and the measurements were simple -- a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound ...etc.

I don't know where I went wrong. I looked in the oven and the batter in the pan was heaving, like lava boiling under the surface...and it was boiling over the top of the pan and filling the cookie sheet I'd (brilliantly) set it on. It took twice as long as it should have to finish baking and at that point the cookie sheet (1/2 sheet pan, actually) was full of baked batter and the cake itself was the strangest texture ever.

I bought 8 pints of blueberries this weekend and made blueberry cream cheese pie, blueberry pie and blueberry buckle. I have guests staying and all three goodies are completely gone.

When I tried to make my own puff pastry and wrap it around a large salmon fillet. The layers never appeared and the crust was as hard as a..... as well....a cookie.....My guests called it Salmon en Cookie.

My biggest success was making a real bread with yeast. I was always afraid of yeast, but I finally conquered it!

A Linzer Torte (raspberry-hazelnut tart) from the Time-Life Foods of the World series. It looked and tasted so good that guests asked at which bakery I purchased it.

white chocolate, cherry cheesecake

This past year for Thanksgiving I made my first apple pie from scratch, crust and all, and took it to my aunt's house for the entire family to try. It was a recipe from Gourmet for Lattice Apple Pie with Mexican Brown Sugar, and it was a huge hit! No one in my family up to that point really knew how much I enjoy cooking but I think they're starting to learn.

Recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Lattice-Apple-Pie-with-Mexican-Brown-Sugar-350597

My biggest baking disaster is any time I try to bake bread or rolls. It always turns out hard and nearly inedible.

A cheap spring-form pan ruined the Sacher Torte I was working on for a dinner party. As I was pulling the pan out to check the cake's doneness, the clasp gave up, the bottom fell out, and 8 eggs, 12 ounces of chocolate and over an hour of work feel into my oven! To add insult to injury, had to of course clean the oven too!

Baking disaster. I forgot the brown sugar in a batch of cookies. Awful.

My greatest baking triumph: learning to make my own bread. I've eaten at Mrs. Rowe's (my cousin lives in Staunton) and EVERYTHING on the menu is fabulous!

Triumphant baking success: Caramel apple tart. Epic baking failure: Forgetting to put FLOUR (of all things) into a batch of muffins I was making. It doesn't pay to be distracted when you're baking!

Baking success: baking under time pressure. The few times when I barely had enough time to whip something up, flying by the seat of my pants, and still being able to pull off a not-too-bad success.

Otherwise, I was rather proud of my first really good fluffy souffle. I was rather young.

Disaster: I tried to make monkey bread at a friend's apartment for his birthday. The recipe called for a bundt pan, but all I had on hand was an angel cake pan with the detachable center. I assembled everything, poured on the syrup, and popped it into the oven. Five minutes into baking, we smell smoke. Five minutes after that, the entire apartment is enveloped in a thick caustic smog.

It turns out the syrup leaked out of the pan and dripped onto the bottom heating element, burned to a crisp, and started emitting noxious fumes. I should have stuck a jelly roll pan under cake pan, but instead we had to vacate the premises for three hours.

I ruined someone's birthday and almost made his apartment unliveable! :(

Biggest Failure - forgot the sugar in a blueberry cake

Biggest failure is my macarons that floated away in total oblivion & I wept copious tears of utter misery! Success just came by way of this delicious Chocolate Genoise with Mocha Mascarpone (homemade) that I just made for Dad's bday. it was 'cake Nirvana'... http://www.passionateaboutbaking.com/2009/07/chocolate-genoise-cake-with-mocha.html

Worst disaster was rushing to complete 2 pies for a competition and was judged on an apple pie that looked more like soup than pie.

Best baking moment: When I successfully recreated my grammie's granny smith apple pie -- complete with flaky, sugary crust and perfectly cinnamony filling. It brought tears to my mom's eyes.

Worst baking moment: When my mom and I had spent all day washing and waxing our linoleum kitchen floor, and hand washing the inside of our old oven...to reward ourselves we decided to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies. As I was placing the first sheet of cookies into the oven, I slipped on the newly waxed floor, dumping the sheet pan cookie-side down on the inside of our newly cleaned oven. If that wasn't bad enough, as we were quickly washing out the inside of our cookie-dough soiled oven with a bucket of hot, sudsy water, I accidently knocked over the entire bucket which was then filled with gooey globs of cookie dough, onto our newly cleaned & waxed floor. My mom and I sat in the mess and cried/laughed!!!

Baking disasters are infinitely more entertaining than the successes, though the latter are obviously more enjoyable! I once tried to bake bread by letting the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator -- it was supposed to be a long, slow rising to allow me time to do things through the rest of the day without having to worry about baking my bread right on time. Big mistake -- it was like a rerun of "I Love Lucy," with bread dough falling all over the sides of the bowl!!! Never again -- if I'm baking bread, I am 100% devoted to worshipping at its altar rather than neglecting it and having it tell me in no uncertain terms that it will not be ignored ....

I had planned to bake my friend Mia a chocolate birthday layer cake with chocolate- hazelnut buttercream frosting. Both of my 9 inch rounds came out as dense as rocks, and the frosting was equally thick. I brought it to a party and decided to just leave it in the kitchen anonymously; I couldn't take credit for this lump of junk. The next day, I picked up my plate from the party house, and I learned that the cake had not been eaten at all! Instead, some drunkard threw it against the wall of the living room! This was indeed a failure.

trying out a little dark rum in a chocolate chip cookie recipe when no vanilla extract could be found. Cookies were like moon rocks, but man, the batter was good!

my worst disaster has to be the time I tried making honest to goodness Hawaii'n dobash cake for my hubby. He grew up in pearl city, HI and has fond memories of the cakes from birthdays and special occasions. I used a recipe out of an old cookbook which had belonged to his mother... bear in mind I have never had dobash cake and so didn't worry when the icing turned out like a jar of brown school paste.

Hubby made it through half a slice before breaking down and admitting that something just wasn't right. Turns out the recipe had left out sugar as an ingredient in the icing. It tasted exactly like the sum of the ingredients; cornstarch, butter, milk, and cocoa. yuck!!

Best: Candy apple pie with a perfect crust. I haven't been able to recreate it in the last twenty years.

Disaster: Lemon meringue, to this day, 30 years later, I still have no idea what happened to the beautiful meringue that I had on my pie. It shriveled up into a blob about the size of a small thick cookie.

Needless to say I make other things instead of pie. Just a little too hard for me, that's why I'm not a bakery owner.

I was just out of college living with three roommates. I woke up early one morning and decided to make my roomies breakfast. I used an apple muffin mix but decided to doctor the recipe a bit. I sprinkled a cinnamon/sugar mixture on top of each muffin before baking -- much to everyone's surprise, I used cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon.

Triumph - made a picture perfect apple pie (so beautiful we should have photographed it) for Thanksgiving and my family -- usually quite pleased with bakery or even supermarket pie - agreed that homemade really was better!

I once substituted salt for sugar while making chocolate chip cookies :(

I'd have to say that my greatest success was a perfect Bûche de Noël that was just wonderful. Thank you!

My biggest success was with sourdough bread and my biggest disaster was with...sourdough bread.

My specialty is key lime pie, it always seem to be so refreshing in the summer so I make it a lot.

First success-making Santa cookies with my grandma! I still have the rolling pin we used every year.

my cousin and i were about nine years old and decided to bake a chocolate cake. whatever we put in it turned it into a volcano. i scrubbed oven racks for hours.

My biggest failure was pizza dough! It was horrible, and I cried.

My biggest success was perfecting my nana's banana cake recipe (tweaked some things here and there, devised my own frosting recipe), which ended up getting me selected as a finalist in the 2005 Southern Living Cook-Off! I was so proud!

I've really gotten into baking lately--going through flour, sugar, butter and eggs at an alarming rate! I used to wonder if the eggs in my fridge were good anymore--now they're always fresh. I'm ready to venture into pies big time!

Pie crust - for some reason, I decided to make a pie for my mother-in-law, when I had never baked before. By some miracle, it came out edible. Whew. I was allowed to stay married to her son.

Recent failure turned into a success: Carrot cake stuck miserably to the pans. I think the problem was organic carrots + a new recipe = too much sugar. So I added coconut pudding, toasted coconut and a pineapple cream cheese layer and turned it into a trifle. It was so good!

Probably my biggest baking disaster happened soon after I was married. We had company coming and I made a pie but I didn't realize there was a difference between evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk.

4 layer honey cake for my girlfriend with a pecan-cream icing.
it was good.

My success and disaster are all rolled into one. It was Thanksgiving a few years ago, and we had invited all of our friends that didn't have anyplace else to go. Dinner went fine, the actual dessert went fine, and then I had made little tarts and mini cupcakes - nibbles for the rest of the evening. They were gorgeous. Beautiful. Little tiny tarts filled with chocolate ganache and topped with homemade marshmallows or blood orange marmalade, the list went on and on.

And then someone got a little tipsy and a little inattentive with the Wii controller and smashed the bowl of a wine glass. Sending miniscule shards of glass across the room and my teensy tiny little desserts. You couldn't eat them without the definite risk of ingesting a bit of wine glass with your chocolate.

We threw every last one of the away.

The perfect strawberry rhubarb pie cannot be beat.
Worst baking disaster...luckily I haven't really had one yet!

My family's Apple Pie

There are a few strange ingredients that go in, and when it came time for me to make it I almost considered not putting them in... but then I did and it turned out just likes mom's

Worst failure was NOT MY FAULT. I made a gorgeous apple pie. I even used extra dough and created a "scene" on the crust. Then my mom dropped it. Face down.

Every time my pie crust does not shrink down into a 5 inch hockey puck...I consider that a triumph!! I did win an award once for my lemon cream cheese pie, but it had a graham cracker crust. Those I do well!!

Baking disaster!

First attempt at baking cookies, oatmeal chocolate chip to be exact. They stuck so bad to the cookie sheet my cousin and I had to scrape them off with a metal spatula. Not in the kitchen sink because, of course, the garbage disposal was broken. So, we scraped the cookies off in the driveway w/ the garden hose for water power.

Lemon-Almond Tart from Julia Child's Cooking with Master Chefs...turned out beautifully for a very special birthday

I once spent $40 on super exotic ingredients for a quiche only to have the entire thing fail terribly because of using the wrong kind of pie dish.

The man I was desperately in love with requested a blueberry pie for his birthday. I went out, bought a beautiful ceramic pie pan, found a recipe for pie crust, and then just put the blueberries in with some sugar. I'd never made a pie before, and I assumed the berries would extrude liquid and become the luscious blueberry filling I always saw in pie. Instead, they came out of the oven perfectly intact; slice a piece, and the berries would just roll around the plate. He never said a word about it, but neither did he ever propose to me.

Disaster: a lattice cornucopia made with a butter pie dough, baked on an improvised foil form. Into the oven, then watch it melt off the form. Tried 4 times, then gave it up. Still think about it and consider trying again (20 years later) - it was my Everest!

Making cakes for my co workers birthdays, they really loved them, I should start doing that again!

i was trying to make my boyfriend lemon meringue pie...and almost burned down the house...

my most recent disaster were these sunshine muffins. not sure WHAT happened, but they turned out with burned bottoms and hard as a rock (i swear i didn't even cook them the entire suggested time!!) i wanted to crawl into a hole.

My failure was a chocolate cake.I t sank in the middle but tasted good.

As a native southwest Virginian, I grew up with Rowe's. It was the first place I ever tried Meringue, and the first place I ever tried prune juice. It was the only place my mother would let us stop for food on road trips.

As for the baking failure. I had several people over for dinner and might have had a few glasses of wine while cooking. as we ate dinner, I kept checking on the cake, which just looked odd, and was taking FOREVER. After I left the cake in for some insane amount of ttime, I realized I'd forgotten the flour! We ate it anyway-it was a delicious super rich cake soup.

does the time i took a nice hot lasagna in my pyrex out of the oven and placed it on the stove and it shattered and plastered my kitchen count? I had turned the wrong burner on for our green beans! While not baking it was in the oven and quite the catastrophe!

Biggest failure: my first attempt to make banana bread during college years. We realized we have forgotten to add flour when the thing had already been baking for 20 minutes.

forgetting to add eggs to the Ghiradelli brownie mix. the result was concrete and the pan had to be sacrificed.

My biggest success will be the first recipe I make from this cookbook.

Biggest success- learning to make perfect pizzelle (the flat italian waffle cookies). They are finicky, but so worth it once you get it down!

Once I made zucchini bread but forgot to add the cinnamon. It came out with with green lines from the zucchini. It still tasted great but it looked disgusting.

My baking successes are always recipes that sound appealing to me. If I have no interest in the item (cake, pie, whatever), it inevitably turns out horribly. It sounds terribly cliche, but if my heart's not in it, it shows. That said, some of my favorite succeess are the simplest things - amazing chocolate chip cookies, great, fudgie brownies...and homemade marshamallows - to show everyone how easy they are!

Many years ago I bought many things in bulk from a local store. Among other things I had sugar and an amino acid supplement in the same cabinet in the same type plastic bag. You can guess what happen when I decided to make apple pie... It came out looking beautiful and tasting disgusting! So sad to throw it away.

As a newlywed many moons ago, I was distracted while my pie baked--into a black cindery crisp! I mean it was totally forgotten, and the smoke that came when the door was opened---

Both occasions are one in the same for me,
I made a stunningly good pumpkin bisque for Thanksgiving one year - savory and hearty and everyone raved. Even served it in mini pumpkins. Problem was, I literally made 5 gallons - I have no concept of portion size!

Who knew meringue recipes could produce chalky white head-sized rubbers that could be used to correct the arithmetic errors of an entire 5th grade class for the academic year?!!?!

making my parents' 50th anniversary cake, which was a 3 tiered apricot cheesecake, I had to figure out how to put a 16" cakepan in a waterbath that would fit my home oven.

Baking 4 13x9 pans of different bars all in one afternoon for an evening party

I think my worst baking experience was the first time I tried making chocolate chip cookies by myself. I didn't realize how bad they were until my family tried them. I'm pretty sure I mixed up tbs & tsp when adding the vanilla. Whoops!

My very first baking experience happend to be my first cooking experience. I must have been about 9 or 10 years old, it was a weekend morning and my mom and dad were sleeping late. I seem to remember watching a cooking show maybe the galloping gourmet with Graham Kerr, or Julia Child, whoever it was, they must have made bannanas foster because it filled my imagination with the flambe" idea. I thought it would be a good idea to make my parents something special for breakfast, and with my new found flambe" knowledge something quiet spectaculer! I set out on my adventure in the pantry looking for the ingredients to what I wasnt quite sure. A box of banana bread mix jumped out at me complete with directions, I was in buisness! We always had bananas around so I was good there to. Now I had to have fuel for the fire. I know that we didnt have cognac in our house but I remember we did have rum, being of Italian decent I knew about rum cake so I was sure it would be fine. I assembled the cake to the directions, baked it and it came out fine. Remarkably it came out fine, I then cut up some bananas and plated two servings drowning both in rum quite possibly 151.Now for the good part, I brought the two plates to my parents wanting to get the surprise affect to the max I set up a end table outside there door put the plates on it, knocked on the door waited for them to say come in matches ready, I opened the door yelled SURPRISE FLAMBE" and we had ignition. What happend next was a blur, the aftermath was a broken end table, a burnt up comforter, a burnt rug, and the disturbing memory of seeing my parents naked. Afterward I remember my mom on the phone telling grandma what happend saying, I made some sort of cake and he poured booze on it and lite it on fire, and me saying no ma I FLAMBED IT!!

Mini pumpkin cheesecakes last Thanksgiving. People thought they came from a bakery.

My best experience was the first time I had help from my daughter making a red velvet cake. We made quite a mess but the cake was smokin' great!

Disaster? The typical adding salt instead of sugar - yes, I did it! Oh my!

I have an old Hershey's cookbook that produces marvelous results every time. I make a great chocolate cake with a little strong, black coffee added for flavor.

My biggest success is turning the dial to preheat the oven for someone else in the family who is baking!

My own personal success was making a devil food cake once. Turned outlywonderful

My greatest baking success is finally learning how to make my great grandmother's pie crust using her method. It took me awhile, and I had a few of my greatest disasters during the process (including a pie crust that literally disintegrated and became part of the filling), but I've finally gotten the feel for it. I hope it makes her proud.

I made an apple pie in college from apples grown on my parent's farm for a girlfriend. It came out quite well.

My greatest success was the first time I made bread. I was inspired by a retired pro-wrestler (yeah, a "wrassler") interviewed in the student newspaper. He baked bread, read classic literature and was a tour guide at the local zoo. If he could do it, I could do it. And it did.

no disasters but I haven't tried to make anything that seems too complicated for me, I guess the triumph would have to be making pound cakes, just because I had to make them with a hand mixer

My most triumphant baking success was making brownies for my friend.

I made walnut brownies with walnuts that had secretly gone bad...it was a giant inedible pan of musty, nasty brownies. Sick and so, so sad.

Thank you for participating, and congratulations to our winners:

kevlney
Sigilum
firni
merstar
_greenbean

Winners have been notified by email and also appear on our Contest Winners page.