Baking failure, design triumph?

When the accuracy or credibility of a report is questionable, one useful question to ask is: Did the person who wrote it stand to benefit from reporting it in this way? The assumption is that you might very well lie to make yourself look good -- by inflating circulation figures, increasing the size of the one that got away, overreporting the amount that was contributed to charity -- but there is very little motivation to lie in order to make yourself look bad.

So you should rest assured that I speak the truth about this last baking attempt of mine, the first in my current kitchen. It definitely cannot be classified as a success, if what I had aimed to do from the start was produce a batch of golden-brown, fragrant, subtly alcoholic cupcakes.

However, if I'd set my heart and mind on developing stackable cupcakes (for the space-constrained, among whom I have cast my lot), I'd call it a definite winner. While I can usually fit a maximum of four fluffy, dome-shaped cupcakes into one of my containers, with this batch I managed seven.



There you have it, the truth on a plate. I could have just not blogged about it, let my worst kitchen failure to date fade into the gentle forgiving, forgetting arms of history. But something in me perversely wants to document the less sparkly bits of life alongside the good ones. Anyway, who knows? Maybe I can sell the concept to some Scandinavian mass producer of flat-pack, modular furniture. Seems to go with their general philosophy.