HI COOKERY

This page is a gallery of our cooking experiments gone awry. HI Cookery keeps it real by sharing our food flops.

From Crumbly Muffin Tops to Pumpkin Cake Pops

We salvaged sticky overfilled muffin tops and transformed them into cake pops for a Halloween post! (Lots of practice makes pretty pumpkins.)

A Monstrous Mess

Cookie Monster no likey maca-wrongs!!! The Sesame Street star gets the birthday blues on November 2 when the messy macaronage was overbeaten and it was too runny to pipe perfect macaron discs. As a consolation to Cookie Monster, we quickly baked and decorated chocolate cupcakes to celebrate his birthday (see our blog post here).

Van Gogh? Oh, No! It’s Hula Pie. Oh, My!

The macadamia nut ice cream bombe totally bombed when we tried to spread fudge topping on the supposed dome shape. It melted like a lava flow, creating a unique artistic design. But we continued to freeze the muddy-looking mess as is. It still tasted “ono” for an “oh, no!” hula pie food flop. Ono means delicious in Hawaiian.

A Royal Pain

It took us about three times to get our galette des rois right for the Feast Day of the Three Kings. The filling kept leaking from the dough. It was a royal pain to clean up the messy drips in the oven! Then we had an epiphany—make sure the filling and puff pastry are chilled well, the dough is sealed tightly and the galette des rois is baked in a lipped pan to catch any leaks. Galette des rois is a northern-style French king’s cake that has a breadlike texture and creamy almond filling. Ironically, the French word for “bread” is pain.

When Life Gives You Lemon Maracons…

…Make them again until you get them right! We wanted to welcome spring and celebrate World Macaron Day on March 20 with bright, sunshiny lemon macarons. Instead, we got “lemons”—the cracked, hollow shells were deformed discs (some were even shaped like lemons!).

Charred Chicken

Highlander treats his wife, Islander, like a goddess—he serves her burnt offerings! On our new grill (a Christmas gift from her parents), he tried to barbecue guava-glazed drumsticks and charred the chicken. The heat was too high.

Oreo Birthday Blunder

One of our Oreo cookie pops was a flop. Like our pumpkin cake pops above, the Oreo slid down the stick because it wasn’t cold enough to handle the heat from the candy coating.

My Heart Overfloweth…

Psalm 45:1 (ASV) this is not! Our stained glass heart cookies overfloweth with too much melted hard candy and not goodly matter.

Deflated Ego Chocolate Soufflés

A food flop in the kitchen can deflate our ego. Look at the lack of confidence we got from our fallen chocolate soufflés.

Not So Lucky with Lemon Meringue Pie

A runny lemon filling and an overbrowned meringue made a big mess. So we downsized the dessert to make tiny tarts instead.

Bad Ballokume

This is not the way a cookie is supposed to crumble. Our Albanian cornmeal cookies (ballokume) turned out badly.