Carla Hall's Most Spectacular Baking Fail - Exclusive

Even seasoned bakers like Food Network television personality and acclaimed chef Carla Hall experience baking fails. It's easy to think that once you've mastered a culinary art you're immune to missteps in the kitchen, but a baking blunder can happen to anyone. We recently spoke with Carla Hall at this year's New York City Wine & Food Festival (NYCWFF) where she was co-hosting the Baking Championship: Fall Flavors event alongside chef Duff Goldman to learn about her culinary secrets as well as about the time a recipe in her kitchen completely fell apart — literally. 

"Oh my god. I was making a pound cake and it was so beautiful," she revealed. "I'm looking in the oven, I'm like: This is going to be a really good one. I take it out and it literally collapses." Baked goods can collapse for a number of reasons, but the most common instance happens when a baker opens their oven during the baking process, which can cause the dough to sink. 

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.