My Poopy Cupcakes

For Mother's Day Michael and I made plans to spend the afternoon with his grandma. I made the chicken pot pies ahead of time and froze them, but I waited to make a dessert. I was hunting for an orange-chocolate cupcake combo and decided on this recipe from Chockylit's Cupcake Bakeshop blog. Then I did a little more searching and used this frosting recipe over at SlashFood.com.

I really wanted to like these cupcakes. I really did. Unfortunately the flavors of the Cara Cara orange simply killed this recipe (and I don't mean that in the recently popularized "good" kind of way).

Please note the delicious "cat poop" inspired frosting.

There were so many things that went wrong with this baking experience... Starting with not planning ahead. Instead of sitting the butter out and waiting for it to soften gradually - I nuked it. Yes, I committed one of the seven deadly sins of baking and microwaved my butter. Then, also due to my lack of preparedness, the proper oranges for this recipe remained sealed away in my freezer, hence the Cara Cara oranges. But the most damaging blow was over-mixing the batter. The end result was like biting into a orange-cornbread-textured cupcake with a chocolate flavored turd on top.

A poopie look to match an equally poopie flavor.

Oh.. and at the time the decorating choice was completely unintentional. But in hind-sight, maybe it was a bit of a Freudian slip, eh? Needless to say, these were "reserved" for Michael to hawk up to his co-workers rather than grace his grandmother's taste buds.

Would you still try to give away a dessert you knew was less than your best, or would you rather chuck it and pretend it never happened? What's one of your worst meal disasters and how did you respond?