Halloween baking FAIL - Expectation Vs Reality - screwing up a simple recipe!

It’s embarrassing, honestly.  I spotted a really lovely, simple recipe on facebook, cute little rice crispie cakes shaped into pumpkins.  It looked like something the girls could make with minimum effort and we could film it for our new YouTube channel.  The photos look so cute and the ingredients were cheap.  Why not I thought.  So we chatted about it, they wanted to do it and they wanted to film it so we set aside Saturday afternoon to do it, after carving some pumpkins.  

So gleaming eyed and enthusiastic, the girls sat waiting.  I pre-measured the ingredients and set up the camera.  We diligently followed the recipe, stirring the marshmallows.  They took turns to stir and there was no fighting (#mumwin).  We decanted the sticky sweet mixture into a bowl and got the food colourings ready.  Orange food coloring doesn't seem to exist, so recipe says mix red and yellow.  A nice lesson in mixing primary colours to make a new colour - therefore an educational element to our task - #mumwin!

The description says add mixture drop by drop and she added 4 drops of red and 12 of yellow.  I delegated this job to myself.  I carefully poured in the red, aiming for a drop, ending with a splodge.  Oh bugger I though.  I’ll add a bigger splodge of yellow.  Not quite right, so I added some more red, then yellow, then red and repeat, then I started googling and I could see on editing the film after that Olivia carried on adding them! And Molly eats constantly throughout the video!

We were going for orange.  We ended up with dog poo brown.  I blame the asda own brand food colouring combined with my lack of accuracy. #mumfail

That’s ok.  We have more marshmallows, we’ll do it again.  What a wonderful lesson to teach the kids.  If at first you don’t succeed, try again.  I entertained them with eating some non-green smarties (as these had been decanted out for the stalk of the pumpkin) and we quickly stirred the mixture.  I got out some Dr Oetkar food colouring gel, thinking that a better quality gel would give a better look.  I started out with precision, adding two parts yellow to one drop of red.  The best I could get was peach.  We decided to just go with it. I don't know where that went wrong, seemed like a simple instruction!

We added the rice crispies.  They were bloody hard to stir, we only managed to get half the required rice crispies in by the end.  It was actually quite a funky texture, the girls described it as cloud slime.  It didn’t smell particularly nice.  It stuck to everything, they had to wash their hands like lady MacBeth.  We moulded them, they crumbled, we added more rice crispies and tried again.

Ta-Da. Peach slodges! 

I wanted to re-brand them as Halloween brains.  The kids wanted to put chocolate on them so I was voted down.

I am so bad at this stuff!  A terrible baker, cocking up with kids recipe was a new low though.

Right - now for the Abby-esque positive spin.  We had fun, there was minimum shouting.  We all ate rolos and smarties and got to lick melted marshmallows.  We laughed.  We didn’t give a shit that it went wrong, genuinely.  We’re happy to share our fail with the world.  I’d have another go but only if I can find actual orange food colouring. 

You can watch this on YouTube here - https://youtu.be/KoLJenv9KVk

The recipe and how it should have looked for those who want to have a go!  Share your photos with us so we can be inspired to try again!

https://onelittleproject.com/rice-krispie-treat-pumpkins/