Cooking Failure One

I've had two rather colossal failures recently. A few weeks ago I decided to make churros for the Monday night gals. This was one of those recipes from someone else's blog, complete with a set of pictures that took you right through every step from gathering up necessary ingredients to a plate full of professional looking churros. Nothing about the instructions seemed too out-of-line difficult so I figured it would be a pretty straight shoot to my own plate of churro goodness.

The first snag came with trying to put the dough into a pastry bag. Blogger Lady had been honest enough to mention the inadvisability of using flimsy plastic baggies, explaining that the warm and heavy dough would wind up splitting through plastic quickly. I rounded up a somewhat cheap pastry bag set I have and started stuffing my dough into the bag, once it had been coupled to one of those star tube opening thingees.  I'm sure they have some kind of better name but darned if I know what it is.

You're supposed to drop the churros into hot grease fairly quickly but it was taking more strength than I could muster to squeeze the dough out from that star nozzle. After a few minutes of not being able to push enough out for a churro, I finally gave up and took off the star. Now the dough could be squeezed out easier but, instead of nice ridged shapes, I wound up with what looked like churro turds.

I could've lived with serving up a plate of sugar coated turds if the insides of my too fat churros hadn't wound up kind of doughy. I'm not sure if the unappealing softness was due to the grease getting too hot, the churros being too thick, or a combination of the two. One thing that was certain however - there was no way I was going to serve those decidedly non-churroish turds to the Monday night gals, or anyone else.

After dumping my efforts into the trash, I would do a little further research, only to find out I could've used the Pampered Chef decorating tube I already own, complete with a star nozzle more the correct size for pumping out non-turdlike churros. I'm determined to try this recipe again and succeed!