Pound cake is a dish that’s particularly close to Carla Hall’s heart as it’s a dessert that her grandmother made for her when she was a child in Nashville, Tennessee. Notwithstanding Hall’s connection to the dish and her supreme baking skills, sometimes even for the best bakers, the cake, pie, or cookies you’re working on just don’t turn out. After Hall discovered that her pound cake had fallen, she inspected the dish in the oven and discovered that the whole thing was unusable.
“So I get the crunchy top and it is wet. It is awful in the center. I don’t know, I clearly didn’t put the right ingredients in and I had to just watch it just deflate, my whole cake deflated. It was terrible. Terrible. And I couldn’t even use it in pieces. Oh my God, it was terrible. An hour and a half of my life I couldn’t get back,” she told Mashed. Fortunately, not all baking fails are so disastrous, but even after a particularly bad baking mishap, the best thing to do is to set it aside and start again.