Sco-nonos

Ladies and Gentlemen, as most of you know, cooking is about being able to learn your way around umpteen amounts of foods and infinite flavors, but please, please, please take my word for one thing:

WHEN A RECIPE CALLS FOR UNSALTED BUTTER, USE U N S A L T E D   B U T T E R!

I embarrassingly made this mistake, and trust me..that's what it was; a mistake.

I decided I was going to prepare some cranberry walnut scones so that we could have a Thanksgiving-esq breakfast. You've never heard of that before..you normally hear Thanksgiving dinner, or for us, a Thanksgiving 'linner' but no one ever has a Thanksgiving breakfast; so I figured they would be a nice light breakfast and set the mood for the day.


WRONG!

It was about 3:30 AM when I made the scones, and being extremely exhausted, I didn't really notice what kind of butter I used. The recipe obviously calls for unsalted, but if all you have is salted, then cut out the extra salt added into the dough. Yeah, well, I thought I grabbed unsalted butter, and I didn't, so not only was there a lot of salted butter in the dough, but I added the salt the recipe called for. I didn't even realize it until I tried them at the end, and to be honest, I gagged. There was so many things that went wrong with these scones, let me tell you.

The baked, nasty, clumped together scones

1. The salt. WAY too much salt.
2. I didn't check the oven I had preheating. I don't know why my family decides to leave foil with drippings from other meals in the oven, but they do.This drippings burn. When I opened the 400 degree oven, a HUGE cloud of burnt-smelling blackness escaped. Keep in mind it was about 4 AM at this point. I rushed to turn on all the fans and open the doors...imagine how mad my family, and our guest would be if awoken by the fire alarm.
3. I had already poured the batter into my scone pan and was getting ready to place in the oven when the whole smoke incident happened. Afraid of the smoke making them taste burnt, I began preheating the other oven, leaving the scones in the pan while it got up to temperature.
4. While the scones were waiting for the oven to be ready, the baking soda decided it wanted to start working, so they doubled in height before even getting in the oven.
5. Because they doubled in height, the top looked like one flat surface. I knew baking them like that would just make the tops bake together, but I was so tired, I didn't really care. (That's really bad, folks. Care about what you do, no matter what time it is.)
6. Well, that's exactly what happened...the tops baked together.
7. I took them out and attempted to put them on the cooling rack, 8 of the 16 crumbled before I could even get them out.
8. I finally got the rest out and instead of throwing away the crumbled ones, I tried it, and almost threw up.
9. I left the other ones to cool and went to bed, I figured they may taste different after being completely cooled.
10. When I woke up, my mom asked me if those were to eat for breakfast because she gave one to our guest...she gave one of those nasty things to our GUEST! I'm supposed to be a pastry chef, and she gave her one of THOSE SCONES. I was so embarrassed.

I ended up apologizing to her for having to eat those, and tossing the rest in the garbage where those suckers belonged. :}

Lesson learned, guys. Lesson learned.