Once upon a time, I got a text from my friend Charlotte. She suggested that I occasionally write posts about cooking disasters. I liked the idea, but didn’t think about it too much, because how often do I really ruin something so bad it burns to death, explodes, or sets off the fire alarm? No all the often. But then I made this gingerbread house and my meaning of disaster shifted.

I decided I want to make a gingerbread house from scratch back in October. I thought to myself, “it’ll be fun,” and also “you’ve been baking for awhile now, you can totally do this, and it will totally look great.” So, my confidence was strong that I could make something delicious (it was) and decent looking (it wasn’t). I chose a Mary Berry recipe, because I love her on the Great British Bake Off and I trust her recipes. This recipe makes a lot of cookie dough since the house is fairly tall. My first roadblock was that I started mixing the dry ingredients and realized I didn’t have enough ginger. Stupid rookie mistake. But then I went to the store, I made sure I had everything else and I started baking.

Foolishly, I decided to make this after work one day. Because it totally makes sense that after a long day on my feet talking to children, I really want to make an elaborate gingerbread house. Anyway, the cookie dough mixed together well enough and I divided it as the recipe suggested. The first ball of dough rolled out nicely and I cut out some shapes from the house’s template. It was hard to get it up and onto the parchment paper, but I managed. However, the subsequent balls of dough had started to dry out. The dough was getting flaky and crumbling off as I rolled it out with my rolling pin. I was getting so frustrated I started using my hands to flatten the dough and stick pieces together. You can see that this method led to lumps and wrinkles in the finished cookies (which I think also led to structural integrity issues later).

Finally I had the pieces cut out and they were baking in the oven. While they were baking I smashed apart some hard candies which were going to go in the windows of the house. It was like 8:30pm and I’m making a serious racket and the candies are barely breaking up. Ryan is looking at me like, “what are you murdering over there?” So I stopped smashing and just used whatever small bits I had. I pulled the cookies out of the oven, sprinkled the candies in the openings, and baked it some more. When they came out, the cookies looked nicely browned and the stars and windows had a lovely stained glass appearance.

However, I made yet another mistake. In taking out the tray I got the thumb of my oven mitt in one of the cookies and made a noticeable divot. Sigh . I was disappointed, but at this point my hope wasn’t lost that this house could still look amazing. I decided to let the cookies cool and I’d assemble them the next day. I was feeling frustrated and I knew I wouldn’t have a beautiful house if I was decorating with rage.

The arrow points to my thumb print of shame.

The next day, I removed the cookies from parchment paper. Some pieces came off easily. But the ones with the candies seemed to have fused with the parchment paper and I couldn’t get them off without breaking the candy. So instead of beautiful stained glass, I had broken windows. My house was going to look like a Christmas village that had been abandoned in the woods. I started to pout. And then a bottom corner under the window broke off. Pouting turned to melt down.

“The house is ruined!” I shouted.

“No,” said Ryan, “It’s just the back, it’ll be fine.”

Always the voice of reason, I decided to listen to Ryan and trudge on. I made the frosting and it was thick and fluffy and tasty. I iced the cake board and then started to assemble the walls of the house. I was following the instructions to the letter and I was feeling like it was coming together. I had 3 walls up, and was about to put on the back wall when one side wall fell over. UGH! The wall fell into the frosting on the cake board and now the house looked like it had snow up to the windows. I propped that wall back up, and then the other side wall fell over. Well at least it would be symmetrically messed up.

I started yelling at my house, about how it was hideous and ruined and terrible and wasn’t going to look nice at all. Now that I had put my thumb in the cookie, broken a wall, broken the windows, and had icing all over 50% of the the house I gave up hope. This was not going to be a beautiful magazine worthy gingerbread house. Now all I could do was cover it in sweets. I decided not to use a piping bag to decorate (why bother!) and I just used a knife, my fingers and some candies.

I also chose to give up on waiting. “Hey Ryan, it says I should let it dry over night and then put on the roof. Should I just put on the roof now anyway?” I asked.

And, I think, sensing my frustrating at this project that had already taken me two evenings, he said “yeah put the roof on.”  It all ready looked like an abandoned shack and waiting over night wasn’t going to fix that. So I used chopsticks as support beams – and Ryan said “real houses have support beams,” – and I placed the roof on top.

It actually looked kind of nice (from some angles). It is clearly homemade. It is not beautiful and won’t win any awards. It won’t get re-pinned on Pinterest or get picked up on BuzzFeed. But, I actually still felt proud of myself. I had made a gingerbread house entirely from scratch. So I took pictures of the house, warts and all, so I could share it. I took all the pictures I wanted, I put my camera down, then sat on the couch.

I sat down, and the house collapsed. I couldn’t help but laugh, and laugh hysterically, like Tom Hanks in the Money Pit (minute 2:18). This was not an ideal attempt at a gingerbread house. Stil, disaster might be a bit harsh as the cookies did taste really good. And it was house shaped for about 5 minutes. But, I learned that I like to bake so it tastes good and makes people happy. I’m not a baker who can make things beautiful, and that’s ok. So next time you feel bad that what you made doesn’t look like the picture, think of my gingerbread house and know you’re in good company.

If you’re still feeling brave and want to make your own gingerbread house I used this recipe from Mary Berry. It has a template which is nice. For other recipes, I’m really impressed by this recipe from Cavoletto. This recipe is for tiny houses that can hang on the edge of your mug of cocoa! I like it because it’s showing off a bit, but I also think smaller pieces might be easy to cut out and work with. I also like this recipe from Oh Sweet Day. Her decorations are lovely, but simple, and feel like I could actually replicate it. Finally, this haunted gingerbread house from Curry and Comfort is amazing and should just be looked at for enjoyment purposes.

Final point, is that this was SUPER messy. I mean 10 spoon messy and my scale only goes to 5 spoons. It was maximum messiness both days. I had mountains of dough flakes on the floor. I had icing on my face and hair. It was overwhelming and sort of impressive how big the mess was.

And if you are making a gingerbread house this year I want to hear about it and see it. Post about it in the comment below or send me pictures of your creations at cookingismessy@gmail.com. Good luck and happy holiday baking!

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Last Saturday I was hanging out with my friends, Mala and Anna, and we decided to try out the chocolate pasta. I’m lucky to have very adventurous friends – although maybe now they’ll be more wary of my cooking. We decided to try the pasta, sans bacon, since I didn’t have any. We were going to go basic: oil, crushed red pepper, maybe a little Parmesan.

So I boiled the water and dropped in the pasta. The  kitchen filled with the most decadent chocolate aroma. It smelled like hot chocolate. But that is not descriptive enough to truly convey how great it smelled. It smelled like hot chocolate on Christmas. It smelled like when you have hot chocolate and curl up with a blanket and a book on a rainy day. It smelled like when you’re a kid and you come in from a long day of sledding and you’re face is pink and cold and your mom has hot chocolate waiting. It smelled like the best hot chocolate of your life.

And that’s probably the worst part because that smell was a lie. A horrible, disappointing, lie. Smell and taste are supposed to be so intricately linked! If a dish smells good, then that is supposed to indicate that the food will taste good.

After the pasta had been cooking for a bit, I fished out one almost-done chocolate noodle to taste. It was gummy and pretty flavorless – like what I imagine mushy sawdust would taste like. I had read that chocolate pasta doesn’t taste like a candy bar, but that there was still some chocolate flavor. This tasted nothing like chocolate. Now I was worried. I gave half of the noodle to Mala, who very kindly suggested that it wasn’t done yet and we should withhold judgement.

The water was turning a dirty brown. Dark brown, like when you’ve let a tea bag steep for too long. Was that where all the chocolate flavor was? I don’t know, because unfortunately I didn’t taste the pasta water.

But, my bold friends and I powered forward. We drained the pasta, served ourselves small portions, and added our toppings. Crowded around the table, I took my first bite and declared, “this is bad!” Anna tried to be supportive, and said some things along the lines of “it’s not good, but it’s not that bad. It’s not the worst.” 

“No,” I insisted, “this is gross, bad, and a disappointment.”

Mala took one bite and said she wouldn’t eat  anymore. In fact, all three of us agreed we weren’t going to eat more. The pasta was bitter, gummy, and unappealing. It tasted bitter like when you buy very pure, very dark chocolate – but there was no richness or chocolate flavor to counter the bitterness. It gave immediate bad breath and made me want to brush my teeth. We all dumped our bowls into the trash. And then we complained, moaned, and hypothesized about what could have happened.

Did I do something wrong? Maybe. But we all felt like I just boiled pasta, how could that have changed it?

Could it be that it was gluten-free? No, we decided. Each of us had eaten gluten-free pasta before and had never had such disastrous results.

Was it the toppings? I’m not sure, but companies make chocolate bars with pepper. And Anna rightly pointed out that, “oil and cheese make everything better.” Also, we felt like the pasta tasted so bad that even if we had gone with strawberries and whipped cream, it still would have tasted bad.

I didn’t expect chocolate pasta to replace regular pasta. I didn’t expect it to be like eating a candy bar. But, what I’d hoped for was a new flavor, something that would be surprising and delightful.  This was none of that.

Do you know what I did wrong? Or have suggestions on what could have gone differently? Out of intellectual curiosity, I’d love to know.

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