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I love baking, and I make things all the time, but every once in a while I still do an elementary mistake...I over fill the cake pans. Last time I did this it was with a chocolate layer cake. Halfway through baking, I peek in the oven and see this globular mess all over the place. Frustration! It still tastes alright, but doesn't rise nearly as nicely. I think I frosted it anyway... :)

Y'know the pudding cake that you pour the boiling water over before baking? Well, if you forget to put the baking powder in your batter, you get a hocky puck floating in chocolate water...

Two words: Flour shower.

Assuming a cake pan is no-stick because you forgot to put in a coating, and having to scrape the cake out.....Or decorating a cake up all nice and pretty for a birthday party, getting the smart idea to put it in a hat box lined with wax paper....resulting in a very mangled cake upon removal.

My first cooking job was at a nursing home that was about to close. The chef left me a recipe for apple crisp that called for 'fat'. I used the bacon grease that he had been saving for the birds.

worst experience ever.. making a huge batch of buttercream only to have it fall apart miserably the next day when we forgot to soften it enough before trying to work it..

I was trying to make a flag cake for my little brother's 4th of July birthday. Every year my mom made him a flag cake, with marshmallow frosting and strawberries and blueberries. So I wanted to keep up the tradition.

I knew that she always used real marshmallows and melted them down and then iced the cake. (There may have been more to it, but I couldn't remember, and the recipe wasn't written down.) At the grocery store, buying ingredients, I saw a jar of marshmallow fluff, and I thought, this is perfect! I can just use this!

I was wrong. The cake looked great in the refrigerator, but as soon as it was brought out for serving, the slow ooze of the frosting began. Imperceptible to the casual glance, the fluff slowly and steadily oozed outward until the berries looked like a drunk, disoriented marching band, irrevocably losing their form in slow motion. Tasted great though!

Mistook powdered sugar for cake flour. The cake wound up in the trash.

My mom is very neat. At one point, she stored all of her dry ingredients in identical white crocks. We made our favorite cheesecake squares with salt instead of sugar. Didn't realize the mistake until several people simultaneously took bites of their squares and then spit them out.

I also used cream of rice instead of sugar in my tea and didn't notice until halfway done. Needless to say, my mom now has large labels on the crocks!

When I was 18, I once tried to make my now-husband a cake in the shape of the Operation board game using multiple cake pans. Of course, I didn't know how to get cakes out of the pan without tearing them apart, so I ended up with piles and piles of broken cake pieces. I ended up buying an ice cream cake.

The first time I attempted to bake bread. The middle was squishy and just tasted like yeast. And the outside was burnt to a crisp.

i attempted to make my older brother a gourmet cake in a backcountry kitchen. desperate to infuse the alpine environment with some bright colors, i proceeded to frost the entire mocha vegan cake with tang-flavored frosting. needless to say, the frosting was horrible.

Making a fondant covered cake shaped like a boot in 100 degree weather. Fondant was a disaster. Then keeping the cake outside in 100+ degrees. Talk about a serious meltdown!

I break brownies!! I can't tell you exactly what I do that makes them so horrible but I have never once in my life made a good batch of brownies. They end up dry and cakey and practically come out of the oven stale...

Bonus wreck - I went on a date last week and the guy had prepped an apple cake to bake while we ate dinner...but he forgot to turn the oven on.

One of my first baking experiences: Blueberry muffins in 8th grade home economics came out green. I got extra points for bad baking, creatively.

Baking soda instead of baking powder. Cookies tasted like metal, but people still enjoyed them. I still think I just have really polite friends.

This isn't exactly a *baking* disaster, but it still involves the oven, so I think it counts... I was broiling some fish and the recipe tells you to put it as close to the heating element as possible. I heard some crackling while the fish was cooking, but thought nothing of it as I just thought it was the marinade/sauce sizzling on it, but then I opened the oven to find that the fish was ON FIRE! Fortunately I was just cooking for myself so I ate it anyway (and after you got past the burnt crusty part the fish inside was fine), but I'm embarrassed to say that this happened twice with the same recipe...

I love to bake cakes for friends and coworkers on their birthdays, and I'll usually do a layer cake of some sort. Well, it turns out that the oven in my apartment was even more unbalanced than I thought, as my three layers ended up a good 1 inch thicker on one side than the other.

As far as a "professional" bakery wreck, I had requested that the bakery staff at a local grocery store pipe "Thank You" onto one of those giant cookies. My cookie said "Thang You", and the guy behind the counter seemed offended and confused that I wanted it changed.

there was the time i almost set my friend's house on fire by trying to warm up some bread dough in the (electric oven) in a bowl with a dish towel covering it. not fun.

Any time you have to throw out the cake pan, it can be assumed that the baking excursion was not a success...

Plus, frosting will NOT fix everything, regardless of how many layers you apply in a desperate attempt to keep things together.

I thought the 1/4 on the measuring cup was the same as 1/4 tsp of salt. A quarter of a cup of salt in the cookies= inedible cookies. Lesson: don't let a 10 year old make cookies by themselves.

Then there was the "quick" apple cake recipe I tried to make for our pre-fast Yom Kippur meal: It never cooked through and only rose on one side of the 9" round cake pan, ending up looking like a brown ski slope. Hubs passed by and asked "What's that?" "Failure, dear." "Oh, okay."

I made a very tall, many-layered cake once -- maybe 8 layers -- and the top layers started to break and fall apart so I had to prop the cake all over with cookies before frosting it. It wasn't so bad in the end because the the 8 layers were impressive, so no one seemed to mind the cookies all over.

I used wax paper to line a cake pan instead of parchment paper . . . it started smoking after about 15 min and I salvaged it by pouring any non-solid batter into another pan.

In high school, I signed up for a culinary course. The first day of class, my teacher was demonstrating the "proper technique" for cutting tomatoes, and proceeded to slice her finger open with the knife... we attributed it to nervousness because we knew she was a new teacher. The second day, she gave us a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, which called for 1tsp of salt. After the entire class had "tossed their cookies" whilst trying the finished product, she realised that she'd fudged the amount of salt in the recipe. I dropped the class that day.

a classmate at school using baking soda rather than cornstarch in pastry cream

I remember making a cake for my boyfriend in high`school. But instead of buying out of a box, I decided to use a recipe book and changed everything so I could use organic ingredients. It was a disaster. It never got dry. I decided to put the temperature to 420, and all it did was burn the top and the bottom, but the middle never got dry.

My Very First Baking Disaster:

Tollhouse cookies, but I misread 1tsp salt as 1Tbsp salt. And had used up all the flour in the house, so couldn't make a second batch.

It was a sad day.

Still no idea what went wrong, but I had a pound cake that was heaving and boiling and overflowing the pan.

all i'm saying is that salt does not equal sugar in a cake recipe

....a quick cake need....to find I was half a cup short of flour with everything else ready to go

Our family's classic cake wreck story: my brother's graduation cake was ordered from a bakery that was also hired to create our wedding cake. The graduation cake arrived and we tried and tried to cut through it, but we kept hitting something hard. Trying not to tear the cake up, we carefully cut away cake to find a LARGE serrated knife had been left in the raspberry filling layer of the cake. No discount was given for that error, but my Mom did get to keep the knife as a souvenir!

My friend and i were making chocolate cupcakes and right when i was about to put the pan into the oven, i tripped and i got chocolate cake batter all over me and the oven. So we had half a batch of cupcakes and after we frosted them, and put them all in a nice container, they all fell over and we had a big chocolate frosting/cupcake glob in the container

Using olive oil in a brownie recipe. Definitely not a good thing.

making a vegetable oil pie crust

After our first child was born my wife made me a birthday cake. She left the completed cake on the kitchen counter and went to tend to our barely 2 week old daughter.

Upon returning to the kitchen she saw the remains of the cake being devoured by our 1.5 year old Basset Hound.

My wife sat down and cried, then proceeded to make another cake.

It was a horrible happening but a memory we always share.

I was making a batch of biscotti, and underbaked the dough the first time. So after it came out of the second bake...I had stale, rock-hard biscotti. stale, rock-hard INEDIBLE biscotti. I haven't tried attempting to make them again.

We ordered a store-bought cake when my mom received her masters degree in writing. As we were putting the candles on, we realized it read "Congrulations!". We decided the misspelling was highly appropriate for the celebration...

French Bread. It never rose, it smelled weird and ended up baking into a puddle. Ate it anyway.

My most recent baking mistake: Making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and forgetting the oatmeal. It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was missing!
Not baking, per say, but the olive oil story reminded me of a time when I tried to make Annie's mac and cheese without butter. I substituted EVOO instead thinking it would taste the same (stupid). It was hands down the most disgusting pasta I've ever had.

i completely botched a pineapple upside down cake. too much butter and too much pineapple led to a buttery pineapple mess... too bad cause i know its a good recipe.