What's your worst cooking disaster? Am I the worst?

Quite a few years ago I decided to make a full dinner with desert for my step-fathers birthday. I made the cake first. I hid it in the oven so he wouldent see it. Forgeting the cake was in the oven I pre-heated the oven to cook dinner. I started the appetisers and went to put dinner in the oven and that is when I realised the cake was in there. I instantly tok it out and put dinner in and started to cry. I was only 17 at the time(plus I was PMS'ing) I called my mother so upset asking her to pick up a cake on her way home from work. The cake was Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Well we ended up eating the cake anyway. All that happened was the frosting melted in to the cake and made fudgy. Instead of cutting it up we just grabbed forks and dug in.

My worst disaster: I wanted to make cheese stuffed cornish game hens for a fancy dinner get together. I had a delicious recipe and went and got all of the ingredients plus a roasting pan for the game hens. I basted them, I stuffed them with a garlic and herb cheese spread and I stuck them in the oven. I don't know what happened, but the cheese spread exploded inside the hens. It was everywhere! And the hens themselves were dry and over-cooked on the outside and undercooked on the inside. I spent the whole next day cleaning that oven and getting all the burnt cheese goo off of the walls. Needless to say, the dinner party didn't go as planned.

lol! I know the feeling! I once blew up an entire duck! :) I was preparing to roast a duck with with an orange flavored stuffing that contained Gran Marnier as an ingredient along with regular brandy... The idea was to coat the inside of the carcass with the mixture and add your stuffing ( which should have been pre-cooked, I learned later). Place the bird in a 450 degree oven to brown it and then lower the temp to 300 or so to cook it... oh well, It was a holiday and the glasses of Merlot were making me a bit "merry" and forgot about the "lowering the temp" part... All of a sudden I heard this WHOOFF sound and when I ran into the kitchen and checked the oven... It was goodbye duck, hello oven cleaner! Poor thing... it'll never bother anyone again! :(

I personaly haven't had a horrable one, just burned a few things, but it was just for me so I made something else. but my little sisters managed to set taco shells on fire one day! one turned the oven on, and preheated it. The other put the shells in thinking that she had just turned it on. that and they left them in there for 20 min. I never thought that was possable until they did it!

My first Christmas cake was a disaster. I was just about to put the cake into the oven when my husband asked me why I had put the brown paper around the outside of the tin. I told him it was to stop the edges of the cake from burning. I put the cake into the oven and went off to bed, setting the alarm to waken me four hours later, when I expected to see the results of my hard work. I saw the results less than three hours later. I awoke to the smell of smoke and when I went to check the oven, the cake had gone on fire. Needless to say, my husband was grinning all over and said 'so much for your brown paper'.

I don't think I could top anything you just wrote. But I think my dad could. When my mom was in the hospital. He had to cook dinner. Well, everything was going ok til he put a glass bowl of cream corn on a burner that he thought was off. Well, next thing that happened was this loud bang. We all ran to the kitchen. The cream corn went everywhere. Some of it was stuck in the ceiling. The glass bowl completely shattered and we found pieces stuck in the walls. Luckily my dad didn't get hurt. We had fun cleaning that up. After pulling corn out of the ceiling and glass out of the walls, we had to fix the kitchen before my mom came home.

I really had a great time reading all you responses. Great topic, and funny stories. The good thing about cooking disasters is that you can always just throw them out and start over. I just messed up Thanksgiving dinner. We just moved to the country, and we have a propane stove and oven. Well, needless to say, I don't get the gas oven at all. I have burned steaks, undercooked chicken, baked cornbread that is uncooked in the middle, and the Turkey was not done either. I cooked it 30 degrees hotter than the directions, and an hour longer. Still, it was undercooked. *sob oh well, it was just us and the kids, so we ate LATE again. Everything else was cold and overcooked.

ss to hear of all you mishaps lol been there and done that. When my husband and i were first together i thought i will make him a great chinese dinner. I cut the chicken and meat in strips and marinated it for a couple of hours cut up a huge amount of veggies had the rice everything. So i use my wok and cook up the chicken meat and veggies no problem every thing smell great. I am thinking see you do know how to cook I pat myself on the back thinking i am doing a wonderfull job. So now its time for the fried rice i put the rice in the wok and start cooking, Well its not getting soft it actualy smells bad and is just not cooking right the outside got soft but the inside was still hard. I think well it will taste better when its mixed with the veggies and meat. My hubby sits down and goes to eat and the look on his face is not a good one but he finishes his plate then has another. Me i pick out the veggies and meat so sad cause my great meal is awful. I called my mother later that night to tell her what had happened she asked me how i had cooked the rice i told her in the wok. It was fried rice after all. Well what i didn't know is you have to boil the rice first then put it in the wok lol. And my hubby must really love me cause he ate 2 whole plates of the stuff.

The egg exploding in the micriwave is scary. i heard a horrible incident of omeone trying to cook an egg in a microwave, a horrible idea, and she nearly destroyed her face when she opened up the mictowave. i suggest not cooking in the microwave at all, it is horrible health wise, so many people wonder why so many are getting cancer, microwave turns your food into a carcinogen.

I don't know if grilling counts but that is my deaster and it just happened two weeks ago... here it is. I got some beef ribs from my father-in-law sometime during the summer, but I never got around to cooking them. I had a free day a couple of weeks ago so I thought that I would slow cook them on the gril. My plan was to just turn on one side of the gril and a place them on the other side and slow cook them. And for the most part this plan was working wonderfully. I was turning them every half hour or so, and applying BBQ sauce as I did this. This went on for about 4 hours. At this point I was just about done with them. They were starting to smell really good, one of the ribs had all ready fallen out, so I knew they were just about done... well guess what... they were probably done then. But did I stop no! One more coat of BBQ sauce and I went back inside. The smell of the ribs was great I could smell it inside the house. It was time to take them off the gril. I went out side and as soon as I saw the gril there was smoke pouring out of it. When I open the gril, flames shot out about three feet in the air. The ribs were on FIRE! And I mean fire! The flames were everywhere, they were even coming out of the back of the gril dancing right up to the house. I moved the gril away from the house and tried to blow the flames out. While this may work on birthday candles apparently it does not work on flaming enferno ribs. I had to go inside and get a glass of water and dump it on the fire. The fire was out, but the ribs were ruined. They were chared to a chrisp. It looked like I had placed a log on the gril and left it there to burn. All I could do was laugh! I am going to try it again here sometime in the next couple of weeks. But this time... I am stopping at 4 hours.

When I was a little kid I used to help my Mum make Macaroni Cheese all the time - it got to the point where I could make it by myself with Mum just supervising...always turned out perfectly! When I was about 16 I attempted to make it for my partner and thought it worked fine...I remembered all the ingredients and remembered the times for the microwave and the oven.....BUT, one mouthful and it almost ended up over the other side of the room! It tasted like boiled cardboard! I tried about another 3 times over the next year...and each time it seemed to get worse! lol I can now make a very respectable Macaroni Cheese, but with a different recipe! =)

The worst cooking disaster would probably be when i tried to roast a chicken in the oven. The sparkler didnt spark but the LPG was already filling up the inside of the oven. When i tried to lit it up with the use of the matches, it almost caught me on fire.

I just have to say, out of all the people I know, I am the only one who has successfully burned spaghetti noodles while boiling them. I don't know how it happened. I started to make dinner for my family one night. I put the noodles in the water and the next thing you know, they are burnt black to the pot, with the water still there. I don't know...it still amazes me to this day.

I've been known to put something on to boil and forget about it. Many times I've walked into the kitchen to see smoke rolling and find no water left in the pan. I'm also bad about getting distracted when I'm baking cookies. I'm really TRYING to do better about setting the timer though.

My worst cooking experience is with boiled eggs, I put a few on the stove to boil and forgot about them and went outside to do some chores, when I came back int the house the eggs had exploded and literally stuck to the ceiling, the bottom of the pot was burned completely through, and the element on the stove had shorted out and burned all the top of the stove...luckily I didn't burn the house down..

I made brownies and forgot to add the eggs, geez it came out horrible. Ill never forget it...I never made that mistake again!

it's fun reading all of this... :o) can't say i've ever had a cooking disaster though. ... hehehe... becuase, i can't cook.

No, you are by far NOT the worst... Let me tell you a story, Christmas dinner, I would have been about 7 years old.. My aunt cooked the turkey for a good 27 hours, she had a pot of coffee on for around 8 hours.. Needless to say, the turkey gravy came out like road tar.. The "instant" mashed potatoes came out like wallpaper paste, and the frozen veggies.. It came to the end of the dinner, and on the way home, it was so bad my grandmother told us to go through the drivethru at McDonalds....

I don't think you are the worst. My experience was when I fried a fish. I forgot to turn off the stove when I went to the toilet. And I completely forgot that I was frying a fish. Later I smelled funny smell from the kitchen. The fist had turned into hard charcoal!! Ha ha. Funny ha?

The worst cooking disaster..... OH NO!!!!! STILL I LAUGH ON THE SAME!!!!:-D I am from South india and there is a dish called 'uppuma' which is one of my favorites and one day when mom was not at home, i tried to make the same, went to kitchen and with my knowledge i took all the ingredients. This dish is sort of u can call it a hot pudding or something like that. The water proportion has to be correct. I started my cooking, poured oil, put onion, chillies, curry leaves, etc etc and fried them, then when it was ready, i poured water into it, i think i poured more than the required, but i didnt know.. i thot it was correct, poor me... then i added the flour which was fried and kept, i tried to mix it and i was slowly mixing, actually the water proportion shuld be correct that the whole flour would get correcty mixed with water, but to my disaster the water was more that it became a curry..... and the rest can be guessed.... hi hi.... this is just one among my trial in cooking....