Setting fire to pasta?

That's quite an achievement.

We put a casserole in the oven once on a low heat that would be done in a couple of hours by the time we got home. Unfortunately due to transport problems it took several hours longer to do the round trip than we had planned, and when we got home there was a very interesting smell greeting us at the bottom of the stairs, and a pyrex dish of charcoal sitting in the oven.

I baked a cake with my niece when we were down visiting last week.

Left it in for the length of time it said on the recipe, checked it with a skewer before taking it out of the oven etc etc.. the entire middle fell out of it as it was only part baked - round the edges were perfect and utterly delicious but the middle was a total fail.

I still have no idea what happened because, as I said, I put a skewer into the centre and it came out totally clean.

Me and my mum made a microwave recipe chocolate cake once.... it exploded in the microwave. Chocolate everywhere!!!

?

Ive done that!! The cake walls collapsed and the inside slid onto the side and on to the floor...

A friend of mine had a similar experience with heating up a jug of custard when she first got her microwave.

I remember when I got my first microwave many years ago, I tried to reheat a piece of toast that had gone cold because the phone rang. I guessed a minute on full power would probably do enough.

It took me a week to get rid of the smell of cremated toast.

I once melted chocolate in the microwave and melted the bowl as well...

I am a good cook *honest*

? One of my least favourite smells in the entire world.

I tried to make a beef stifado a few months ago. Bear in mind it's a recipe I've done countless times with great success, but somehow this time I forgot to brown the beef before putting it in the slow cooker. It disintegrated into the sauce. Revolting. We ordered pizza instead.

When I was about 15 I used my dad's old fashioned egg poacher to make my brother poached eggs. I left it on the cooker with the eggs in feeling very proud of myself. About 5 minutes later the smell of burning plastic alerted me to the fact that all was not well. I had melted the egg poacher as i didnt put any water in it. It was my nan's and was 25 years old my dad was not impressed.

I was 10 and home waiting for my mum to get back from shopping so she could make lunch. I winged at my dad that i was hungry but he didn't pay any attention (rugby was on). So I stuck an egg in the microwave and put it on to cook for 3 minutes. It pinged, I opened the door and bang, egg explosion all over me. It burnt my cheek quite badly and my day got a rollicking from my mum for it all haha!

I put a pan of milk on the hob to make porridge - I ended up 'burning' it completely.

Not a direct cooking thing, but I once made a cheese toastie under our grill - completely forgetting H's plastic lunchbox was sitting on top of the grill - it melted into the grill and it took weeks to get the smell of burnt plastic out of the kitchen. H still teases me about it now.

Im the mary berry of the cooking world so have never had any cooking failures!!

Oh....except for the time i made toad in the hole recently and it was like liquid burnt crisp...or the time i forgot id left a sweet potato in the oven and left oven on overnight....or last christmas where i put the HUGE turkey in the oven on low on christmas eve to slow cook it overnight and then christmas day i realised id not put the oven on at all..or the times ive made gravey and made it so thick its had to be scooped out fo the pan.or adding sugar to dinners when i thought it was salt..I could go on, but i wont ?

We made some butterfly cakes the other day but the flour had been kept in the same cupboard as our spices, namely the cumin.. so the butterfly cakes came out tasting like curry.. yum!

I posted in here last month as I'd burnt toast, to he point i forgot about it until I saw smoke pouring into the other rooms. The alarms were going off left right and centre, the puppy was going crazy.. It was that bad I had to hold my breath, run round the house opening all the windows wide. It stunk for days after. Oops.

Our house currently stinks of toast which my lovely husband burnt at lunchtime! He put bread in the microwave to defrost, but mistakenly left it on full power - for five minutes.

My first cookery lesson at school was making fairy cakes, which I had made many times before. Unfortunately my Mum used to keep all her dried ingredients in similar containers. It was only when I was struggling to cream the margarine and sugar together that I realised my mistake - salt instead of sugar. This doesn't work - don't try it!

In my old house, which was rented, the cooker didnt have any instructions and I used to have a nightmare trying to get everything cooked well - everything just seemed to burn underneath.

The day before I moved out, I found the instructions while packing and realised that had I turned the oven on to to and bottom heat with fan, instead of just bottom heat, I might have had more success!!!!

All I will say is - You can't fry eggs inside an Aga.

Should have had a ready meal Mini....

How dare you even suggest that?!

Welcome to the world of amazing cooks. I tried many times many things but fortunately fail. But I never gives up. I am still trying.

I baked a cake once and forgot to put margarine in it. I didn't notice til my mum said the cake looked a bit flat, had i used the right sugar, Once i talked her through what i'd done, she turned to me and said "Did you put marg in?" Oops....

I remember when i cooked for my OH for the very first time. I made Mac n Cheese, but i always make my own cheese sauce. I don't know what i did, but i some how ended up making him ill from it. I wasn't much better though.

I have redeemed myself though! I make an AMAZING French Onion Soup!

if you buy a new oven, get one that will switch off after a certain time to prevent this from happening... we don't have one but it's on my list of things to get!

I once microwaved a jacket potato and forgot to prick it. Cue jacket potato explosion all over my kitchen.

When I was younger, I was cooking one of those cheese and onion slice thingies which needed to be baked for 15 mins or so. I turned the oven to the grill setting and left it in there for 15 minutes. It was like a black rock.

Rented flat plus gas cooker means it's not something that we are likely to do until we move.

If it hadn't been for the transport problem we'd have been back in time anyway.

Here's a tip when you bake a victoria sponge, it works a treat for me..

Decide how many eggs you're going to use, weigh them and then use the exact same weight for the other ingredients. e.g. if you decide to use 3 eggs that weight 100g, use 100g flour, butter & sugar and mix it all together. Haven't had a bad cake yet

My kitchen nightmare...

I was about 14 and my mum asked me to put some vegetables on. I put on a pan of water, added the veg and left them to cook. No idea how, but after a while there was this AWFUL burning smell, rushed into the kitchen to find that all the water had evaporated and the vegetables were burnt & stuck to the bottom of the saucepan. In a panic, I took the pan off the heat and plonked it on the worktop, only to later discover I'd burnt a ring in the worktop!! My mum went balistic, understandably, as it cost a fortune getting a new worktop panel put on.

My brother did this when he was about the same age as you, i came home to find smoke coming out the kitchen and him looking a bit puzzled. I laughed and said you forgot to add the water!! ?

I have turned the wrong ring on on the cooker and burnt a ring cover.

I have plonked a tupperware down on a ring I've only just switched off and then spent hours scraping melted plastic off the ring.

I have done the cake-fail where the middle just collapses.

I have used what seems to have been the wrong size tin for a cake and ended up with with cake all over the bottom of the oven.

I have attempted to make ginger flavoured marzipan by adding powdered ginger to marzipan until it smelled gingery - the stuff would have blown the roof off your mouth and could possibly have been used as rocket fuel.

I have forgotten that puff pastry pinwheels expand out the way, not up the way and ended up with one very large pastry confection instead of the delicate snacks I was aiming for.

I have doubled the quantity of pancake batter then forgotten that I've already doubled it so doubled it again.

My dad attempted to rescue an underdone boiled egg by putting it in the microwave. All looked good when he took it out until my little brother stuck his spoon in it and the yolk popped, leaving us all with little bits of yellow dandruff.

I often melt our horrid toaster 'accidentally' when using our large frying pan. If I carry on at this rate we'll have to replace it with a shiny Dualit...

I set fire to cheese on toast under the grill once as I got distracted on the phone. I was about 15. Impeccable timing too, as it was the day grandad had had our house valued. I've never seen him move so fast when the smoke alarm went off! He was terrified I was about to wipe out his retirement fund.

Not so much a cooking disaster, but I also burnt a plastic bag onto my mums electric hob when I switched the wrong ring on. I did wonder why it was taking so long for the water to boil. And when the room started to fill with black smoke I realised why.

My mum went into hospital for a planned operation when I was about 11 - she left dad with loads of frozen dinners but she put the chicken and the grazy from the casserole in two separate containers for some reason. She did label them but Dad only reheated the gravy as he didn't realise, so we had gravy and boiled potatoes. Mmmm.

The first time I cooked for my OH when he was living in a shared house, I put the wok on the hob with oil in, left it went into the living room to talk to him and his housemates and then noticed flames reflecting in the window. Thankfully I caught it in time, but I learnt my lesson - never leave oil unattended. I knew that anyway, not sure what I was thinking.

We use those dinner trays that have cushions underneath - OH put it on top of the hob that had just been used to make dinner. Cue the smell of burning fabric and hundreds of little balls from the cushion everywhere.

Ah yes, I can never forget the time I put a frozen pizza in the oven and didn't bother to use a tray to put it on.

Neither did I notice the polystyrene tray that it was sitting on.

That took hours to scrape out of the oven - and the smell took somewhat longer to get rid of.

You know how ASDA do those fresh pizzas they make in store? Apparently you need to put them on a tray...or they will sort of slide through the oven bars and you will have to clean your parents oven before they get home from hols.

I haver never put these on a tray?? ?