"baking failure" news and stories

I guess I was due. I mean, it has to happen occasionally, right? It all started Saturday afternoon when I was hanging out with some friends. Angie and I started talking madeleines (because of my post last week) and she handed me a beautiful Donna Hay cookbook to take a peek at her madeleine recipe. I've always loved flipping through Donna's magazine in Barnes and Noble and I was quickly drawn into this book of hers as well. The Simple Lemon Cake recipe leaped out at me and I copied it down to try at home.

Tonight I felt like baking and so I flipped open the moleskine notebook into which I had written the recipe and started to pull ingredients together for the cake. I added some chopped rosemary to the lemon zest, thinking that it would add a nice depth of flavor, but that was the only addition I made. It smelled wonderful as it baked, and when I tested it with a skewer after the prescribed 35 minutes, it came out clean. After letting it cool for a while I cut into it and discovered that something was...off. It was as if the center just hadn't baked. I put it back into the oven for a while, but soon discovered that no amount of time and heat was going to fix this sucker.

I once had something similar happen to a loaf of banana bread into which I put too much apple sauce, but I was a little agog that it had happened while I used a seemingly tried and true recipe with which I hadn't messed around (unless somehow I wrote the recipe down incorrectly). It has a good flavor but resembles something closer to a pudding than a cake. I always hate it when good ingredients don't reach their full potential. The recipe is after the jump, in case anyone wants to try it on their own, or just take a peek and tell me where I may have gone wrong.

Photo by Marisa McClellan