Two weekends ago, I was craving brownies. Luckily, I had a packaged brownie mix in the pantry. All I needed to complete the recipe was water, oil, and eggs. Uh-oh! Eggs! I didn't have any eggs!
Surely, somebody has had this problem before, so I turned to Google and learned that I could use 1 tablespoon of baking powder, 1 tablespoon of oil, and 1 tablespoon of water in place of each egg. Since my recipe called for 2 eggs, I doubled the above list. I thought to myself, "Self, that's an awful lot of baking powder..." but I shrugged my shoulders and mixed everything up.
I wanted extra-thick brownies so I baked them in an 8-inch by 8-inch pan. About half-way through their 50-minute cooking time, the smell of cocoa permeated my apartment. I was in heaven!
When my kitchen timer went off, I opened my oven and before the I could see inside, I knew I had a problem. Smoke was pouring out of my oven! As soon as it had cleared away enough for me to see inside of the oven, I knew what had happened.
The baking powder had caused my brownies to rise so much that the batter had bubbled over the sides of the pan and had burned into a black sludge on the bottom of my oven. (Good thing it has a self-cleaning cycle!)
The brownies looked fine. Until I cut into them. Without the eggs, there was nothing to hold the batter together as it cooked so what I had was a pan full of thick chocolate sauce. I didn't want to waste it, so I scooped some out onto a plate and tried it. It wasn't bad! It was slightly bitter (from all the baking powder, I think), but other than that, it was pretty good!
After a night in the fridge, I actually had something I could cut and remove from the pan without using a spoon. The results weren't disasterous afterall. I finished the last brownie a few hours ago.
I don't bake often because unless you're pretty precise, things don't turn out (as evidenced by my brownies). That's why I prefer to cook. You don't have to follow a recipe or measure exactly to end up with something that tastes good!