Sugar High Friday #65: Personal Feats of Dessert

This is an invitation to revisit your dessert memory vault and take another look back at...a dessert disaster.

Perhaps you only remember the way it made you feel, the disappointment and embarrassment, or you have only a vague recollection of what actually went wrong--like any other bad experience that gets instinctively blocked out because of negative emotions or trauma. You've buried it in the past and have moved on with your life, though you carefully (perhaps even for years) still avoid it- that recipe, that dessert, that ingredient, that genre of desserts (pastry, tarts, souffles) that you couldn't manage to make delicious. You are wounded.

As the host for this month's Sugar High Friday created by Jennifer of The Domestic Goddess, I am asking all participating bloggers to conjure up those recipes, ingredients or genres of dessert that are lodged deep in their "I'll NEVER make that dessert again! Ever!" places.

Bring us your failed attempts, your ruined creations, your watery, your risen and fallen and recreate them right before our very eyes! As the phoenix rises from its own ashes, I invite you to go back to a past failure and from it, create your own Personal Feat of Dessert. No matter how basic or easy the recipe or ingredient was, if it proved challenging for you to make it come out the way you wanted--it is fair game.

Perhaps cakes have always gone wrong for you and you've resigned yourself to mixes forever. How can anyone make a cake from scratch?

Or maybe it's candy. That stuuupid thermometer is NEVER right!

Do puddings confound you? What do you mean 'until it thickens,' it never thickened!

For me, I've had perpetual troubles over the years with anything that involves egg whites as a core ingredient or that involves using a candy thermometer. Any recipe involving those things in my cooking is doomed to fail. I just can't do it--I can not. What do you have to choose from? Bring it into the light of the Web and engage this month's Sugar High Friday in some true transformative dessert therapy. We will be here to witness your feat of dessert.

Need more inspiration? The editors of Cooking Light did a nice article in their March issue about the 25 most common cooking mistakes- read that and I'm sure some inspiration (blocked out past dessert memory) will come to you...

How to Participate

Post your submission to your blog by Monday, 26 April 2010. Once live, email me the following items (my email is jasperpippi [AT] live.com) with the subject line: SHF#65.

• The permalink for your entry- your entry must be live on your blog in order for you to participate
• The name of your blog and its main URL
• A brief summary of your entry (1 paragraph max)
• What country (or continent) of the world you live in and typically blog from
• A 200x200 pixel .jpg thumbnail image of your entry

If you not have a blog but would like to participate, post your entry in the comments to this post and I will refer to it in the roundup (please do send me a photo and the items above via email, though so I can track your participation).

Photo: Some fudge that turned to hard candy on me about 2.5 years ago Photoshopped together with a Rising Phoenix photo used under a Creative Commons license.