One of my coworkers says she gets a letter when someone tries a recipe from the magazine and it doesn't work. Often this reader wants the money she spent on ingredients to be reimbursed by the magazine (which the magazine doesn't do). I always scoffed at these readers, but now at least I can sympathize with the sentiment (although I still would never expect such a thing).

I printed out a recipe from another blog this morning, for caramel-topped brownies, and really ended up with a stinker. I think the problem was that the instructions said to use a 9-inch square baking pan, but I noticed later at the end of the recipe "makes 50 brownies." So I'm thinking it should have been baked in a 9 x 13-inch pan. The pan was really full, and the brownies took 20 minutes longer to bake than they should have (by that time, the caramel layer had both burned and oozed into the brownie layer, making a big mush). I have no idea how the recipe would have turned out if the instructions had specified the correct pan size, but I'll never know (I actually had to throw it out). I'm too mad about wasting all of my nuts, vanilla, butter, eggs, chocolate, etc. to give it another go.

So I want to apologize to anyone who might have tried cooking (particularly baking) anything from here and got bad results because I transcribed something wrong. My mom calls me every once in a while to say, "I don't understand. Your site says to (fill in blank with one of my silly mistakes)." I am grateful for the constructive criticism. I'm a copy editor in my day job so, while the blog is an attempt to escape that for a little while, I can appreciate the benefit of a second pair of eyes reading things, especially recipes.