Parenting Help: How to Eat the Errors

A lot of baking is trial and error. No matter how closely you follow a recipe, things can still go awry. Is it me or are recipe authors always leaving out some tiny detail that's crucial information for the recipe's success?

My grandmother used to announce, as she brought out the family dessert, "It's not pretty, but it sure tastes good!" Words to live by.

Not how it was supposed to look but still delicious.

Today, I attempted to make Mini Pumpkin Patch Fudge Pies. As you can see from the pictures, I overfilled them. They were so hard to remove from the pan. Are they pretty? No. Do they still taste good? Heck, yes!

I shared with my family the idea behind the recipe - to look like a pumpkin in the patch and that was enough. "Cute attempt, now let's eat them," was the general sentiment. I could have obsessed over how they were supposed to look, but since my son was helping me, I knew it was important to model overlooking imperfections.

Part of parenting is letting kids know it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay for things to not be perfect. That's hard for a lot of us to accept.

Baking is a great opportunity for imperfections to be acceptable. Flaws to be forgiven. Mistakes to be overlooked.

Eat the errors. Learn from them, then move on. In life, and in baking.