Ugh, I hate when recipes fail.

[mwmisses4289]

So yesterday I did our usual mother's day tea for hubby and me. Sandwiches were fine, desserts were fine, but the scones...oy vey! It was not my usual recipe, and it called for a lot baking powder. Normally, I would reduce the baking powder by at least a quarter (most recipes call for way too much, and it leaves a nasty lingering taste in the finished product), but because it was not my usual recipe, I went with it. Ugh, ick, yuk! 🤢 I ended up throwing them out, they were so inedible. I will try again today (my day off, so I have the time), reduce the baking powder and see if that helps.

[Bobstandard]

1. Was it an Instagram recipe?

I’ve given up trying recipes I find on Instagram and YouTube. I’m guessing that many of the ‘food influencers’ copy someone else’s recipe, make it once, then post it. That’s not so bad when they copy a legitimate cook’s published recipe, like one from Jacquy Pepin, or Martha Stewart, who actually test their recipes before publishing. Those work. But when they copy each other things go bad.

[mwmisses4289]

3. No it was from one the hundreds of thousands

"Hi, I'm Suzy/James Q and I love to cook" blog/websites. A U.K. one, I think.

[Bobstandard]

4. Those are the ones!

They either copy a recipe from a successful chef’s successful cookbook or copy some other blogger’s recipe. They often aren’t actual cooks, just folks trying to make money in new media. They make a recipe once for the camera and publish whether it’s edible or not.

I m back to perusing my stash of cookbooks. Very ’old school’ but it works.

And lest I tarnish all food blogs I do trust Serious Eats, Rick Bayless, Kenji Alt-Lopez and some others.

[mwmisses4289]

5. I have actually found a few recipes from some of these bloggers that work.

Mostly gluten free or egg free recipes for pastries and desserts. But this is the first one that I tried that failed so spectacularly.

[MIButterfly]

2. I love tomato Florentine soup and years ago, I found two recipes online

One was Rachael Ray's tomato soup with spinach. My mother and I followed it to a T and to me, it tasted like a bowl of tomato paste. My mother liked it. The other recipe turned out a little better but it wasn't a tomato base, so it wasn't the tomato Florentine I was used to. We never tried it again.