When you create a lot of your own recipes, and try and tweak certain ingredient ratios in the kitchen, you can more often than not have a result sub-par. And as you can assume, I have had many “creative kitchen experiences” that have turned out to be great flops.

I’ve decided that instead of posting only the beauty of food and cooking, I am going to also show a bit of the underbelly of the kitchen as well. These “disasters”, as I will correctly title them, are dishes worthy enough to be sent flying off into space, or enough to give any restaurant-owner a “ban-for-life”.

One weekend morning back in the fall, I felt like being a chemist by mixing some ingredients together to produce the next best sweet snack. I wanted to use this raw honey I had, which I had been putting in all my granolas, and I wanted to make some sort of small, bite-size candy thing. I wanted these things to be made up mostly of honey and milk, and seem almost like a nougat, but better. I didn’t want to pick up any book or search for recipes over any site, I just wanted to start cooking (which is never a great idea).

First, I roasted up some almonds over the stove, which brings us to mistake number one. It would have been better if I had roasted it in the oven, or at least perhaps used a different pan over a lower flame, because the almonds were given an odd, burnt flavor. Then I added some honey to the awfully roasted almonds.

Right after I added the honey, I poured in a fair amount of milk, which certainly looked kind of cool when it bubbled up.

I saw the mixture was getting a little thin, so I added some flour.

Ok, here it doesn’t look so bad. However, it was still too thin to form some sort of shape.

So, I tried to glue it all together with some eggs, and bake it. Oh boy. And the mixture was actually looking edible before… Well, there was no turning back.

So it did thicken, but it also became ugly. I took a little piece of the mound of honey dough at a time, and rolled each one into a little something that unattractively resembled a beaver dropping. And, in fact, they tasted probably pretty close to it too.

These little disgusting honey “things” lasted surprisingly long in my freezer. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so they sat there for a few weeks. I finally shrugged off my shame and threw it in its rightful place.