Massive Fail-Dogs

Last night Emilie and I decided to road-test two of the recipes in my new cook book, which is full of Nanna recipes for cakes, slices and biscuits. The book is produced by the swell people who put out Frankie magazine so it's full of pretty, delicate, frilly images of delicious sweets plattered on 50's crockery sitting atop 70's tablecloths. We were both incredibly, incredibly excited.


15 minutes later we were both staring gormlessly into a bowl at something that didn't quite resemble a cake batter.

"Did you follow the recipe?"
"I think so..."

We shuffled, bumping shoulders over to the other side of the kitchen to stare gormlessly at the book.

"Maybe I put too much flour in"
"did you measure it?"
"... kind of"
"ok so, pour the cake batter into the tin"
"it won't pour. I'll spread in."
"is there enough?"
"it won't cover the bottom"
"spread it thinner. Get a butter knife."


The recipe was for a Belgian Bun with "lemon cheese" centre (no cheese involved). Giving up on the bun, I opted to make the "lemon cheese".

"It doesn't look like lemon cheese"

I was looking at a bowl with a lump of sugary butter in the middle, surrounded by a pool of lemon juice. Any efforts to stir the butter in resulted only in swishing the lump around in the juice. It looked like cancer.

"Did you follow the recipe Tess?"
"... um... woopsy."

The recipe involved melting the butter over a low heat and combining the ingredients, stirring until it thickened over the heat. I, on the other hand, put all the ingredents in a bowl, and stirred.

I won't go into detail about the "chocolate balls" we also tried to make, which resulted in a mixture roughly the colour and consistency of badly digested poo, which we were supposed to roll into balls with our hands, but was so wet it just smeared all over our hands and then we had hands of poo- I won't go into that.