Last Call: What's Your Worst Recipe Screw-Up?

Cheers to the detectives at Munchies who remind us that this week is the 20-year anniversary of A Tale Of A Terrible Tiramisu, an article that ran in The Washington Post in July 1998. (Also bless the Post archives for keeping the original story online.) The true tale centers on a young woman who set out to make tiramisu, but swapped its crucial ingredient, ladyfingers, for something else entirely. (I won't ruin the surprise.) Anyway, this got me thinking about the worst recipe screw-up I've ever made. I think the only truly inedible dinner I've attempted was homemade gnocchi, in which I misread the potato-to-flour ratio so badly that I made cement balls... then I watered them down so much they became like spreadable putty... then I added egg... It wasn't pretty. I ate delivery pizza for dinner instead. [Kate Bernot]

Y'all know I have a recipe screwup. Quiet a few, actually, like my shortbread cookie mountain or my over-salted beef or the time I brought gazpacho to a party and everyone thought it was really soupy salsa. But a major one that comes to mind was when I first started dating some boy in my twenties and tried to make him chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips in them—baking chops I would only pull out at the start of a new relationship. Somehow I was so romance-giddy that I neglected to mix the dry ingredients into the wet, and somehow got the soggy dough (butter, sugar, cocoa mixed together with the peanut butter chips stirred in) onto a cookie sheet, not realizing that these "cookies" were never going to stay together. Sure enough, they all spread out hideously in the oven, inedible. I tossed the whole lot and never said another word about them. We broke up about five years later: Coincidence? Don't think so. [Gwen Ihnat]