Too funny Joanne, I don't have one of my own but I have a funny story that my mother has been telling for years. When she first got married she decided to try making some beef barley soup. The stock was beautiful with it's vegetables and beef bones, when it came time to add the barley it called for one cup. My mother thought that seemed like it would not be enough and added the whole box. It took three men to lift the pot from the stove....it was a good laugh for all.
http://www.noshtalgia.blogspot.com/

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So I was about 9. Mom and I were making a Rhubarb Pie (Which I can never eat again) and She made the filling, I made the crust.
She handed me the recipe, and I followed it to the letter.
To the letter.
And we ate the pie, and something was horribly, horribly wrong with the crust.
We looked at the recipe, which said "1/2 Cup of Salt". So I did that. Mom says, "Well, I know that that's supposed to be 1/2 teaspoon, and I adjust it in my head. Sorry... We'll go get some pie for dessert tonight anyway."

Whoops.

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My sister and I once exploded a cake in the oven. 20 years later, we are still not sure what the hell happened. All we know is that the cake went in, about a half hour later, we hear this loud pop, and smoke was everywhere!! When we finally got to go back in the house, there was burnt cake batter all over the oven. Good times were had by all!!

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I was a little younger (9 or 10 - but also granted full reign of the kitchen) when I made this mistake... I didn't have enough eggs for the cake I was making - so I just left them out.

it looked like chocolate swiss cheese (although tasted pretty good)

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Along the same line as your mint toothpicks, I once secured stuffed chicken breasts with multi-colored toothpicks. All of the chicken had red, blue, and green strips. That was pretty revolting. And I did that when I was 26 so...I think that just means I'm a bit of a moron.

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I was probably around 10 when I decided to help Mom with dinner by making the corn bread. I confused baking soda for baking pownder, and apparently did not mix the dry ingredients well enough. Mom got a mouthful of soda and in shock yelled, "What did you DO to this?" I ran sobbing from the table. I'm in my 30's and I still check every recipe 3 times to confirm soda vs. powder.

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I recently baked a fork in a loaf of banana bread. After adding the batter to the loaf pan I decided to mix in some chocolate chips, was distracted by a phone call, then came back and stuck the pan in the oven. Later I went to cut a piece and couldn't understand why the knife wouldn't go all the way through, and that's when I found the fork. It could have been waay more embarrassing if I was bringing the bread somewhere, which fortunately I wasn't, but instead I couldn't help sharing it with everyone! Oh yeah, maybe that wasn't as bad as forgetting the sugar in the pumpkin pie I made for Thanksgiving. Even worse is I have a reputation as an excellent baker and for being a bit snobbish about it (I brought the pie because I like butter crusts and my mom only makes crisco crusts on her pies which I can't stand) I guess I need to have some humbling moments now and then!

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Pumpkin pie was long my nemesis. I remember making the recipe from the can of Libby's pumpkin sometime around high school. When the pie was done baking, it seemed kind of soft in the center, but I figured that it just needed to cool. After all, pumpkin pie has a sort of pudding-like texture normally. It was completely liquid. When I re-read the directions, I realized that it called for baking at one temperature for the first xx minutes, and then reducing the oven temperature and baking for another 30 or 40 minutes. I missed the second temperature/time altogether.

After that incident, I had several other attempts that went equally as poorly, for various and unrelated reasons (crust issues, condensed vs evaporated milk, etc, etc). It took until my mid-20's before I was able to reliably turn out that pie using refridgerated pie crust, and the recipe on the can.

Pitiful, really. I'm much improved since then, though making a good pie crust from scratch is still hit-and-miss.

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I was trying to make a cooked frosting which was on the back of the package of sugar (underneath the cake recipe) and I mixed up the two, adding yeast and flour to the boiling mixture in my pot on the stove. I ended up with a blob scarier than the one in the movie...

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Hah, too funny. My funniest disaster was making Thanksgiving one year. The gravy wasn't really thickening, so I thought I'd add some cornstarch. Grabbed the yellow box, dumped some in, and... whoosh! The whole saucepan boiled over like a 4-th grade volcano science fair project! Because that's what I'd done, dumped a bunch of baking soda into the (acidic) gravy.

It didn't change the taste much, and I found the cornstarch and thickened it OK. So not much harm done. But it sure was dramatic!

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My girlfriends and I have a tradition called cookie day, we all get together and bake cookies. As you know when a bunch of good friends get together these is a lot of laughter and talking. Well, we got to talking so much that one of the ladies switched recipes mid stream and did not notice. She combined the oatmeal cookie recipe with the oatmeal muffin recipe and skipped the sugar.
These were pretty bad bookie/flat muffins. Well, the straight gal of the group decided to feed the disaster to the husbands who were gaming in the basement. Unfortunately for them, they did not pay attention to all cackles from upstairs, they just ate what was handed to them. It was a hoot. Neither one of them will eat anything that we prepare as a group, until its taste tested first.

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before i started culinary school, i wanted to make my mom and grandma a mothers day brunch. with plans for a shrimp and crab quiche, i went to the store to buy s ready-made pie crust. i accidentally grabbed a graham cracker crust. yeah, it was bad. at least now i learned to make a decent pie crust...

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Where do I begin . . . I made brownies on the stovetop, forgot they were there, and came back about 2 hrs later with the finish burned off the pan. I made brownies that bounced . . . still not sure how I pulled that one off (and they were greasy). I also exploded brownies in the oven because I thought unflavored gelatin would be the perfect thing to thicken the batter to the proper consistency. Around the time I turned 10, I learned the value of checking recipes before baking, and my food improved greatly :)

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The women in my family have a way with screwing up simple recipes. I'll start with my mom. Early in her marriage to my dad, she decided to brine the Thanksgiving turkey. She accidentally used sour salt and completely pickled the turkey.

Years later on another Thanksgiving, my sister decided to make rhubarb pie. She didn't boil the rhubarb first, and it was like eating crunchy celery pie. Gross.

Then there was my stupid mistake. I was in the very early stages of dating this guy that I REALLY liked. I invited him and another couple that we were friends with over to dinner. I made my former roommate's recipe for pineapple chicken, but decided to get fancy and use fresh pineapple instead of canned. Other than that, I followed the recipe to the letter. Well, apparently there is some enzyme in fresh pineapple that totally dissolved the outside of the chicken and it was like biting into wallpaper paste. It was so utterly disgusting, and I was incredibly embarrassed when we had to throw it away and order a pizza. It all turned out ok though - this was almost 10 years ago, and I ended up marrying the guy. We still laugh about the pasty chicken.

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This isn't a story of my own mistakes, though I was involved... My dad decided to recreate one of his favorite New England dishes. You'll forgive me for not remembering what the dish is -- and having zero desire to investigate -- though I'm sure you'll understand by the end of my short story.

My father's prize dish consisted of lobster in a cold, open-faced sandwich. He's a great cook, so I was looking forward to this blast from the past. I watched (very passively, not paying nearly enough attention) as he prepared the meal. When it came time to eat, we all sat down and dug in. Two or three bites down, and I couldn't eat anymore. I couldn't pinpoint it, but something wasn't right. 24 hours later, we all had food poisoning. After a bit of investigation, I realized that my father had bought uncooked lobster (you know, from a can?) instead of the cooked he was used to! To this day, none of us will let him live that bad experiment down.

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The first time I made blue cheese mashed potatoes was absolutely perfect. The Blue cheese was so subtle but added a welcome flavor to the potatoes. I told everyone about them and they kept asking for me to make them sometime. So for thanksgiving each of us was in charge of making a side and I decided upon Blue Cheese mashed potatoes. I used Roquefort instead of the previous mild Amish Blue. And I doubled the amount because I wanted a stronger flavor. I destroyed them. The potatoes were not fully cooked and the strength of the blue cheese could not be reduced no matter how much we tried. I couldn't eat blue cheese for six months and even when I smelled it I almost gagged. My family told me they never wanted to try them again.

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This one's my dad's...

Being out of vegetable oil, he decided to use 1/4 cup of sesame oil in a batch of waffles. The house reeked of Chinese food for a week, and we never did let him live it down. :)

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When I moved into my first apartment, I invited my family over to check it out and have dinner one night. I decided to bake a box of brownies (yes, a mix) but they didn't seem to be setting properly, so I left them in a little longer than the recipe stated. Bad idea, of course--they were horribly overdone! For some reason, though, I thought I would be able to salvage them. I couldn't get a knife into them, so I grabbed a steak knife and began stabbing the center of the brownies like I was chipping ice or something.

My brother and sister walked in just in time to see me drive the knife THROUGH THE PAN. I just looked at it in shock, the tip of the serrated knife sticking through the bottom of my metal pie plate, the handle in my hand, and the entire upside-down brownie disaster looking like some modern art idea of a popsicle. Of course, with witnesses, the story spread and soon NO ONE would eat brownies I'd made. That was back in 1994. Only in 2007 did I FINALLY convince my brother to try a homemade brownie from me again. The story was so persistent that when I got married in 2001, my grandmother's wedding gift to me was a set of Pyrex baking dishes...and a box of brownie mix. ;)

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When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was to make lemonade or cookies and sell them in front of my house. One day I remember my friend and I decided to make cookies. While checking for ingredients I noticed we didn't have enough butter. Not a problem, that's what Pam is for, right? Spray butter! Needless to say, the cookies didn't turn out like we thought they were. My Dad had one taste and offered to buy them all...I think he wanted to save the neighbors taste buds!

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oh goodness, lets see, i tend to have an issue with simply forgetting MAJOR ingredients... i've made chocolate chip cookies and forgot the flour (i have a picture somewhere... mess of dough spread across the whole cookie sheet, oops), i've made cheesecake and forgot the sugar (it was disgusting).

Although most recently, I tried to make cheddar and broccoli soup mainly because I'm addicted to ABP's and Panera's and I really hate spending 4$ each time I want some. It was alright, the bf and I decided to add more cheese and it got better, so we then decided to add A LOT more cheese. The cheese was coagulating with bits of chopped up broccoli and would just sink to the bottom of the pot :o( it was terrible to clean up and completely unedible (although my bf really tried to eat it, we just ended up ordering pizza)

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