Happy Thanksgiving!

As the weather gets colder, I've been compelled to start cooking again, with mostly disappointing results. Today is no exception. I was invited to Thanksgiving dinner at a friend's house, and she had the idea that I should try to bake a cake. I tried to bake two cakes and ended up with half of one. How did I accomplish this confusing feat?

Well, half of one of the cakes ended up stuck to the tinfoil. I was trying to recreate a previous failure, the slow-cooker chocolate cake in The Italian Slow Cooker. Except this time, I searched around on the Internet and found that other people were making a similar cake in the oven. So, I took the sour-cream chocolate-chip cake, the one I am too embarrassed to photograph, out of the oven.

The instructions said to line a springform pan with buttered foil. More importantly, the instructions said to butter the BOTTOM of the pan with buttered foil. But my son was up last night from three to five a.m. because of a scary dream about a monster, and I forgot this important detail about the foil. I put the foil up the sides of the pan and poured in the batter.

Suddenly, I panicked. Would my cake be tremendously misshapen and unattractive? I hurriedly poured the batter back out into a bowl. I lost at least a quarter of it in the process. I washed off the foil as best I could (I ran out of foil and didn't have any more, and I imagine all the stores are closed today), and poured in what was left of the batter. I stuck the whole mess in the oven.

I think my oven doesn't work very well. I always have to double the cooking time. It took an hour to bake the cake instead of 25 minutes. At the end of baking, I cooled the cake down for five minutes as instructed.

I was then supposed to invert the cake. It was then that I lost another quarter of it.

The cake, which had risen somewhat in the oven, sank again dejectedly.

And this, my friends, is how two cakes became one-half of one cake. I am pretty sure I will be attending Thanksgiving dinner empty-handed. But this is probably to the benefit of my hosts.

No-Eat Bread

I'm sure you've heard of No-Knead Bread. This revolutionary new baking method was the brainchild New York Times, and I proceeded to fail miserably at it. I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but my attempt at bread ended up the size of a small salad plate. The crust was the texture of cement, while the crumb was the texture of warm, sweaty Play-Doh.

Eat me, I dare you.

of Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery. Mark Bittman updated the method for the

What went wrong? Well, firstly, I have a tendency to have two different tabs open on my browser at the same time. This was the case when I was trying to bake the bread; I had the above-linked recipe open as well as this one. (Is the second recipe even No-Knead Bread? I don't think so.)

The second recipe specified that I must fold the dough. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is, or how to do that. Belatedly, I perused some Chow.com threads...

Anyway, the third problem was that I was trying out another soon-to-be-ill-fated slow cooker recipe. I accidentally placed utensils and a small cookbook over the "rising" dough. Realizing that this was probably a big no-no, I attempted to rise the bread again.

The final fiasco happened inside the oven. The recipe (or some recipe, because at this point I had forgotten which recipe or message board I was supposed to be reading), directed me to cover the  bread inside the oven for the first half-hour in order to promote rising. The final half-hour, I was supposed to uncover the bread to then promote browning. You guessed it... I transposed the directions, uncovering for the first half-hour and then covering for the last half-hour.

The results are above!

Slow Cooker Disaster #109

In case you were wondering, it turns out that you can't just leave ingredients in a slow cooker

indefinitely. Look at what happened to my rice pudding when I left it in just an hour too long...

If you happen to know anyone who is in the process of building a house, I have a couple of cement blocks to donate.

You Say Tomato, I Say Let's Go Out to Eat Instead

So, I had grand plans for dinner tonight. I was going to make the Tomato Ricotta Frittata from The Italian Slow Cooker. The recipe simply called for chopped basil, grape tomatoes, ricotta, grated parmesan, and eggs to be mixed together and dumped into the crock pot. Simple, right? No. Nothing is ever simple in the kitchen of Cooking Whoops.

I'll spare you a description of my woeful basil-chopping, cheese-grating (I HATE grating cheese), and tomato-halving skills. Let's just say I successfully transferred the mixture into my Cuisinart Multi-Cooker. The frittata was supposed to cook for 60 to 75 minutes on High. For some reason, it still looked like liquid eggs after an hour.

At this point, I received a text inquiring whether my family would like to go out for Indian food. Food is always better in good company (and always better when it's not at my house), so our consensus was that we should indeed go out to dinner with our friend.

This turned out to be the best decision we could have made. When we got home, I unplugged the slow cooker and started emptying out the contents onto a plate. I'd worked so hard on that cup of grated parmesan and was wondering about the results.

I took one bite of the frittata and cringed. Not only was the basil unappetizingly black (I guess I left this thing in the slow cooker for too long, but isn't that the point?) but the frittata had an overwhelmingly acrid flavor. Upon closer inspection, this horrible sourness seemed to be coming from the halved grape tomatoes. I decided to try one of the raw ones, and indeed, they were the culprit. Moral of the story: always taste the raw tomatoes before deciding to use them. Or, just go out for Indian food.

How Not to Use the Slow Cooker

This is not some kind of bizarre bouquet; it is actually a handful of hard-as-a-rock pasta. I thought I simplest tomato sauce."

might try to avoid dirtying another pot by emptying a pound of uncooked penne into the slow cooker after making Marcella Hazan's three-ingredient "

A previous attempt at pasta fagioli with elbow macaroni had been moderately successful, so I thought the trick might work again. I wish I had read this thread, which explains why uncooked pasta is not the best food to dump into the slow cooker.

There is a very famous book called Modernist Cuisine, which was reviewed in the New York Times about a year ago. The book talks about all of the scientific processes involved in creating "molecular gastronomic" food (the term has since fallen out of favor). Do you think a scientist could work with me on a volume about all of my disasters?