just don’t tell the CWA…

Editing is marvellous. It allows you to turn hindsight into present time success.

Like on those cooking shows. Every so often the lovingly photographed finished dish looks just a tad different to how it looked before the close-up. Editing.

I often wonder whether everything works as well as it appears to work on the telly. Do celebrity chefs ever have a bad day in the kitchen?

Over the years I’ve become pretty adept at reviewing a recipe and deciding whether it reads well enough to eat. I don’t really need the photos, but I’m a visual person and I like them. I also like the little blurbs before the main event. You know the ones- where the chef talks about how this reminds him of summer or his mother or holidays in Tuscany or olive groves in Provence. It probably doesn’t, but I want to believe…so I do.

But failures happen to us all. Even from so called fool-proof sources. Take todays muffins for example.

Now, I’ve made a lot of muffins in my time- and I’m pretty good at them. I know all about sifting the flour first (Mrs Locke taught me that one in Year 7 Home Science at Bombala High School). I know all about combining the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet in another. I know all about just slapping them both together until just combined as over working leaves you with a muffin shaped crumb that sticks to the top of your mouth.

I also know that anything that comes from the CWA (Country Womens Association) has to be Good. I know that because the CWA are the bastion of baking in country Australia.

Yet todays muffins, Gingerbread Muffins from a CWA recipe, were most unsatisfactory. There, I said it. I had a failure.

Sure, they taste ok with ice cream (apparently), but to me, they felt heavy. I don’t know, maybe it was the wholemeal flour, but even the batter didn’t look or feel right.

The flavour of the ginger was definitely brought out by the golden syrup and brown sugar, and the diced apple gave the whole thing a rather appealing chunkiness, but on the whole? Let’s just say the judges were not kind. I’ll bet Nigella never has results like that…

In the interests of editing, I will give them another go, but I think I will alter the recipe somewhat to something like a ginger sponge I used to make many years ago. I’ll let you know how it goes…just don’t dob me in to the CWA- I suspect that altering one of their recipes could be a passport retraction offence.

So, what culinary failures have you had?