"It Tastes Great, But..."

...seems to have been my motto today! I made two great recipes, both of which tasted fantastic, but did not look how I was expecting/wanted them to!! Before I continue, I just wanted to state the obvious - the appearance of these recipes is quite clearly my fault, this post is in no way meant as criticism of either of the ladies who wrote the recipes - both are great writers, and fantastic cooks!

My troubles in the kitchen started with breakfast - when I woke up, I read a few blogs on my phone and came across Clean Eating Chelsey's post about Blueberry Pancakes. These looked fantastic - I had to make them straight away!! The batter was really quick to make, but, being an American recipe, it did use cups. I'm not too good with cups. (I do know they shouldn't be difficult but weighing ingredients seems so much more exact!) I think I didn't put in enough oats and flour, so the pancake batter was a bit liquidy. Coupled with my impatience to eat, and therefore not waiting for the oil to fully heat up, what should have been 3 neat pancakes turned into this in my pan...

Ooops...

These pancakes did still taste amazing. I topped them with a few more fresh blueberries, some (too thin - I couldn't even get that right this morning!) peanut flour sauce (peanut flour + maple syrup + milk) and some extra maple syrup for good measure!

As Chelsey promised, these were super filling! A great Sunday breakfast, despite appearances!!

My other kitchen "fail" today was an attempt to make Averie's 3 Minute Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge. I don't actually know what went wrong with this as I followed the recipe exactly (except doubling it so that I used the whole tin of condensed milk, but that shouldn't have made a difference). Whilst Averie's finished recipe looks like proper fudge, mine...did not...

No amount of time in the freezer made this solid enough to cut neatly! They, again, tasted amazing though, which I suppose is the main thing. Izzy definitely approved of the scrapings from the pan!

And we all had some after dinner and loved it. Even Liam, who hates peanut butter mixed into things, fell for me saying it was "just chocolate fudge" and thought it was delicious! (shhh: don't tell him - there's still some left in the freezer I want him to help me eat!!)

This tasted a lot like cold Betty Crocker's chocolate fudge icing - when I was at uni I used to buy tubs of that stuff and keep it in the fridge just to eat spoonfuls of it, and this reminded me a lot of that!!

So I suppose the lesson of today was...so long as things taste good, it doesn't matter too much what they look like. Well as long as I'm just serving them to my family that is! It would be nicer if I could make things look a bit prettier though!!

I have enjoyed some slightly more presentable meals today as well. For lunch I baked some potatoes, scooped out some of the flesh (to use tomorrow) and re-baked the skins.

Served with homemade houmous - this fitted Liam's request for a "simple and not too heavy" meal, without being the boring plain toast that he'd suggested!!

This was just my first round - I think I had 8 potato skins in total, yum!

Liam cooked dinner tonight - a stirfry with peppers, peas, onion, garlic, basil smoked tofu and noodles. I topped mine with some leftover houmous...

I love stirfry with noodles, so flavoursome and filling. The children love the noodles too so we should really have them more often!

Have you had any recipe "fails" recently? Do you make an effort to present your food nicely, or are you more concerned with taste? I definitely think taste is the most important thing when it comes to cooking, but I do try to make an effort with presentation too - eating horrible looking things can be a bit off-putting sometimes. Luckily neither of today's recipes "fails" looked that bad, and they were both so delicious that they made up for any appearance failings anyway!