My heart broke after tasting these scones.  I really love the blueberry scones from Starbucks, and I thought I was on track when I pulled them out of the oven.  They LOOKED like scones.  They SMELLED like scones.  But they tasted like like flavorless biscuits.

I started off with Alton Brown’s basic scone recipe and tried to add my own twist.  I wanted to use frozen blueberries and mangoes  I had from my days of a breakfast smoothie junkie.  So I defrosted the blueberries in a simple syrup and chopped the mangoes and honey in a food processor.  Sadly, none of these flavors even made a cameo in the party.

I really think my mistake was not using dried fruit.  Dried fruit has so much tang and flavor it not only makes an appearance, it becomes the star of the party.

Also I tried to use regular granulated sugar on top, but I think the bigger crystal sugar pieces would have been better.

Every year my dad cooks a ham for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Year after year, it’s always the same: baked ham.  When I was able to score a bone-in ham for less than $6, I was amped to try cooking the ham a different way.

I tried cooking the ham with it’s juices in a crock pot with pineapple juice, maple syrup and brown sugar.  I cooked it for about 5-6 on a slow heat.  It smelled delicious so I thought I was on a the road to something great. Duh-dun-dunnnnnn….

The ham turned out to be ropey and not tasty at all.  I was to salvage some of it, but I had to chuck the rest.  I don’t think I will be trying to slow boil a ham again!

Usually my experiences with box-top recipes have been very successful.  So I thought if I substituted turkey wings for this savory roasted chicken recipe, it would be yummy.  Sadly, this wasn’t the case.

To be fair, let me first say that I’ve never made this dish with chicken so maybe that’s the first mistake — substituting something for a recipe you’ve never tried the original way.  Basically I took turkey wings and threw it in the slow cooker with a seasoning packet of garlic and vegetable soup, white wine, red bell peppers, onions, and green peppers.

When it was finished cooking, the meat wasn’t as flavorful as I imagined it would be.  To be honest, it seems like all the flavor flew away — ok, that was lame.  You deserve better.  I’m sorry.

Now I haven’t done this before, but I think it might be important to share my cooking failures as well as successes.  Hopefully this will help someone avoid these tragedies.

I attempted to make blueberry pancakes by adding blueberry jam to the pancake batter.  Big mistake.  I didn’t take into account that the sugar in the jam would make the batter so heavy that the pancake would not become fluffy.  Although they didn’t taste bad, the consistency was something akin to a wet sponge — or at least what I imagine a wet sponge to feel like.

My suggestion would be to add FRESH blueberries instead of trying to add jam.  If you have jam, it’s best left on top of the pancakes instead of mixing it in!