When my daughter about 10' she made muffins. When they were baked she gave one to here little brother to try. He ate most of it before she tried one and spit it out right away. It turned out that she misread the recipe and added 1/2 cup of salt instead of sugar. BTW, her brothers ther threw up right away.

I'm not sure how cute, but I vividly remember, decades later, one of my early kitchen fails. My dad had become ill, my mother had taken a job. I was trying to have dinners ready, teach myself to cook. I don't know now if the recipe wasn't specific or if I just didn't understand it, but it was for a salmon rice casserole. I was to line a buttered casserole, bottom and sides, with rice, put the salmon mixture in the center and bake. I patted raw rice into the buttered casserole as best I could. There wasn't enough liquid in the filling to cook rice that should have been precooked. Inedible.

I recall using granulated sugar to make frosting once. (I was in my 20s and had not baked much.) I was using an older cookbook that listed the ingredient as "XXX sugar" instead of "powdered sugar." I apparently did not know what that meant.

I don't think many of those cupcakes got eaten.

I remember my very first zucchini bread. I was 14 I think. I got baking soda and baking powder mixed up, or maybe I omitted one because I thought they were the same thing. The batter going into the pan looked fine. But it baked into a sunken soggy mess. I still remember though that I took a spoonful of the soggy mess, and was proud that my first effort tasted delicious, though revolting-looking and inedible due to texture.

I'm not sure what makes a mistake cute other than when it's kids you don't call them fails, but when we were kids we loved making hamentaschen (filled triangular pastries for the Purim holiday celebration). We made the yeast dough kind rather than than the cookie kind, which made it hard to tell for sure what the filling was because the dough would rise around much of the hole in the middle and just showed dark, or orange, or red. With a huge clan and friends and organizations, we made a lot.

Favorite fillings ranged from the traditional poppyseed/honey, prune or apricot to the kids' favorite chocolate or butterscotch chip, with several others in between. Very much on purpose, my brother and I each got away with making one with everything in it. Potentially cute, but deliberate, and culled by my mother who tried to keep a close watch on such things. She gave us those to nibble on before all the family arrived. :) We generally just nibbled the crust. :)

Then there was the year my grandfather bit into an everything hamentash, started turning purple and demanded of my mother, "WHAT are you feeding me???" To which she started to humbly explain about "the children". Grandpa was amazed! The children made the hamentaschen?? Well, that's very good then! But I think he was pleased to change for a poppyseed one. :)

Ha! I still to this day remember running out of the cake mix for our Easy Bake Oven & pulling out my mom's Settlement Cookbook & trying to do the math dividing a cake recipe small enough to fill the tiny cake pan. I must've been around 10 or so. Unfortunately, I did not divide the baking soda measurement & couldn't figure out how to divide the egg, so I put an entire teaspoon of soda & 1 whole egg in, the whole thing overflowed enormously & tasted (& looked) like nothing but a baking soda omelet = (

& yes - I think being a kid makes it cute by default.

Like when I was a little kid and decided to make milk shakes for friends... I wanted a 'garnish' to make it look nice, so I decided on celery. Unfortunately, there was no celery, so I garnished my milk shakes with lettuce. I still have the recipe if anyone wants it! lol!

I just remembered another one from my own childhood, thinking of the candy thread. The first time I made lollipops, about age 10, I didn't have molds. The instructions said to use waxed paper, but now I think they meant for flat. And the sugar pooled rather than making a nice pop. Since I wanted globular lollipops, I kind of molded them around the sticks as the sugar cooled. It worked fine for the shape. They weren't spherical, but pretty nicely rounded and even. But, waxed paper. Crinkly old fashioned waxed paper. The crinkles got caught in the sugar and made grooves and inclusions. It came out with some effort, and a toothpick, but left day-glo turquoise (!! I don't remember how the color was achieved) lollies with sharp, sliced and cratered surfaces. Not the most pleasant texture to be sucking on. :) But cute. :)

Well, my grandkids like to play "Chopped", mostly so that I'll have to taste the vile concoctions they prepare, I think. Bud's latest culinary invention was cheese balls dipped in chocolate frosting, but it wasn't cute at all, it was disgusting! He was immediately chopped...

Ashley used to bring me "breakfast in bed" for Mother's Day when she was small and it was always a cup of lukewarm water with a tea bag and a slice of warmed bread. It was supposed to be toast but she was too impatient to actually let it toast, so when it was warm, it was done.

Annie

When my daughter was in junior high, she got interested in cooking and baking, and went through my cook books looking for recipes. She thought the one for Blueberry Buckle sounded good, so she made it. Without blueberries. We laughed about that one for years. Actually, the cake didn't taste bad at all.

On my 16th birthday, Mom made a beautiful chocolate cake with a "heavenly fluff " frosting. You know the type, take a hot syrup and while it into eggs whites to make a fluffy frosting. Unfortunately, she overcooked the syrup to the hard crack stage...the ensuing frosting became white armor plating by serving time. We had to crack that cake open-in front of all my guests. She could have died!

Not a coffee drinker. Was young, just started a new job, wanted to do something nice for co-workers who took coffee breaks, by making a fresh pot of coffee. Filled the entire basket, level to the top, with grounds. Was told "never make coffee again."

Many years ago, DD was heavily into cooking - she was probably 10-11. She asked me if she could make hardboiled eggs and make egg salad. Sure! A bit later, I smelled something awful - smelled like singed hair. DD yelled from the kitchen that something was wrong with her eggs! There sure was - exploding eggs everywhere! DD hadn't realized that one puts eggs in WATER in order to hard boil them!

She's now nearly 45 and an outstanding cook and is in the hotel/restaurant business running 7 boutique hotels. One does eventually learn...

Mine was a cherry pie for a boyfriend when I was sixteen. My mother was a good cook, though she never really baked pies. But I had a boyfriend who said that he loved cherry pie. Of course on Valentine's Day I wanted to make him his favorite dessert. I bought an unbaked pie shell, dumped in a can of cherry pie filling and baked it. The poor guy tried to eat it, but the raw unbaked crust was disgusting! Needless to say, lesson learned!

My other dessert fail, was back in the days of mud pie. I baked the graham cracker crust, however when the recipe said to add one melted Hershey bar, I added two on the theory if one chocolate bar is good, two is better. Well the chocolate layer was so thick and frozen from the ice cream, that I had to bring out my sharpest and heaviest bladed knife to saw through the chocolate. Our friends had a good laugh and enjoyed the ice cream, but the chocolate was a fail! To this day, DH and I still joke, if one is good, two should be better! LOL

Not cute, but kind of funny in retrospect. I wanted to make pasta sauce and, while browning the ground meat, realized we were out of tomato sauce. I decided since ketchup is a tomato product and liquid, and we had 2 bottles of it, it could be subbed for the tomato sauce. No.