When bad things happen to good cooks

The other day I suggested sangria can raise pedestrian wine to the level of ambrosia. So you won't think I'm some kind of miracle worker, please understand that while I'm good at salvaging borderline booze, I've been known to take perfectly good ingredients and render them garbage-worthy.

Take the time I baked a chocolate cake from scratch, using imported Dutch cocoa. I got so darned excited about the cocoa, which friends had brought back from their European tour, that I forgot the sugar. It made for rather brisk eating, even when coated with extra-sweet icing. Or the time I made an extraordinarily firm gingerbread cake even more so by forgetting to add the leavening. Not sure which was denser, the rock hard cake or its baker.

My greatest culinary calamity wasn't the result of omission, but rather a misapplication of technology. It was 1970-something. I was very young and my parents had just bought a new fangled appliance called a microwave. The contraption was the size of Mazda and had two speeds -- "ON" and "OFF". Turns out it was no substitute for a bread machine. Against my mother's advice, I baked a pan of her famous Swedish Rye bread in the microwave. It's a fantastic recipe. What could go wrong? The resulting loaf was the colour and texture of cement. I don't know how it tasted since no mere bread knife was able to penetrate its armour-like surface. In the end, my father bore a hole through its centre with his electric drill and hung it from a tree for the birds. A year later, neither the birds nor weather had managed to make much of a dent in it. I often wonder if, baked in the right shape, my microwave rye bread could have saved the space shuttle.