April fools in the kitchen: our biggest baking mishaps of the year

It’s that time of year: We’re sharing our annual roundup of baking fails, mishaps, and all-around kitchen disasters. Because even the best, most experienced bakers can be made a fool in the kitchen sometimes.

Copywriter Laura Scaduto’s chocolate meringue cake looks more like a chocolate meringue crater. It’s times like these when a thick, billowing topping of whipped cream comes in clutch to hide imperfections.

Looking for a failproof flourless chocolate cake? We’ve got a recipe: Flourless Chocolate Cake.

Associate Recipe Editor Kye Ameden says, “This is what happens when you leave the last round of waffles in the waffle maker for 45 minutes. I only realized after I smelled char coming from the other side of the house!”

An apple galette that wasn’t. Thanks to some misbegotten handling, it turned out more like a Picasso painting of an apple galette.

This biscuit bake from our Test Kitchen fell, uh, a little flat.

Looking for a recipe that works? Try these instead: Scallion and Cheddar Cathead Biscuits. 

Inventory Planner Sara Booker had an eventful Christmas Eve this year. “We ended up with literal lumps of coal on Christmas morning. Put the meringues in the oven and swore we turned it off … And then woke up at about 2 a.m. to the smell of smoke! We didn’t leave out any cookies for Santa, so we think he may have turned the oven on when he visited.”

This looks more like the surface of Mars than the tasty cake it’s meant to be. Maybe time to break out that whipped cream once more?

When the lemon blueberry cake he’d painstakingly baked and assembled slid sideways, I’m pretty sure Recipe Developer David Turner heard sad trombone music somewhere in the distance.

What was meant to be cardamom bun dough actually turned into a science experiment: Just how sad and flat can a dough get? The answer is: VERY.

Don't worry, we fixed it. Try our perfected recipe here: Cardamom Buns.

Are those deep, dark chocolate cookies? Nope. They’re actually chocolate chip cookies that King Arthur contributor PJ Hamel accidentally left in the oven for 45 minutes. Just like that time you accidentally fell asleep at the beach and went home looking like a lobster.

The cookies that bake together, stay together. Even when you really don’t want them to.

A stuck Bundt is to a baker what Michael Myers is to Jamie Lee Curtis: a constant threat, no matter how many precautions you take.

When it comes to sweet, juicy pastry filling, you really can have too much of a good thing. I’m shuddering just thinking about the cleanup afterward.

The bad news? Contributor PJ Hamel sacrificed a perfectly baked cake while experimenting with the best way to line your cake pans. The good news? She did all the testing, so you never have to encounter this problem yourself!  

Avoid a baking fail of your own by calling our Baker’s Hotline the next time you flirt with disaster in the kitchen.