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.

[Old Crank]

6. For online recipes I usually look at several

Then pick the one that seems best or make a modification balancing two or three.

[Trueblue Texan]

7. I'm partial to old timey church cookbooks...

The folks that contributed to those cookbooks had an audience they wanted to impress. They typically contributed recipes that had been in their family or at least their own repertoire for a long time. I have an amazing oatmeal cookie recipe I adapted from such a book...I call it, "So You Think You Don't Like Oatmeal Cookies?" People embarrass themselves stuffing them in their faces.

I want nothing to do with churches apart from their cookbooks.