Last week, I made a wartime or depression cake. It was so delicious it inspired me to try an invent a similar recipe. Instead of cocoa, lemons were used. The cake would be this delicious lemon brownie type texture with less ingredients than my lemonade cake. The perfect cake. This was going to be fabulous! But was it? Let’s look at the photos first and then discuss what worked and what didn’t. The title: “Depression Cake or Depressing Cake?” should let you know this isn’t going to be pretty.

So what happened? The acid from the lemon juice in combination with the baking soda caused the cake to rise beautifully. And it looked and smelled delicious. Only, it had this strange texture. Like a heavy dense texture that reminds you of a brownie. But without the cocoa powder, this mouth feel is bizarre and unpleasant.

When creating the recipe, I added more flour to compensate for the loss of cocoa powder and it’s drying ability so it wasn’t the fact there was too much liquid. In fact, it looked and felt exactly like a cake. But this wasn’t either a depression cake or depressing cake. It was a total fail.

Do I regret trying to make a new recipe? Of course not. It’s very satisfying when it works. When it doesn’t? You may be upset with the loss of ingredients and time, but remember you learned something that day. Failure leads to success as it shows you how ingredients work together and gives you ideas on how they don’t. I personally feel a bit guilty wasting food when a recipe goes wrong, so I like to experiment on cheap ingredients and small amounts. That way, a bake gone wrong isn’t too heartbreaking.

My goal in writing this is to hopefully encourage you to take risks in the kitchen. Hope for the worst and expect some mishaps. It’s how you grow your culinary skills. Happy baking!