As I promised in the last post, and the one before that, I’m going to show you my very own Pinterest fail, because it can happen to everyone, and I don’t want you to think it’s just you. It’s OK, we can talk. This is a safe place.

Pinterest, that land of amazing stuff where everyone is some sort of Martha Stewart, and everyone seems to have the most incredible houses, kitchens, children, pets, etcetera.

I spend quite a lot of my spare time on Pinterest, not as an addicted person (OK, maybe a bit… a lot, fine) but mostly in between stuff I’m doing. For example, while waiting for the pizza to finish cooking, I might steal a cheeky look at different boards. Or waiting for the bus to arrive, or during my commute. Actually, my commute is the time when I catch up with all the blogs I follow, so not really, but you get the idea.

There are many things I love that I’ve pinned (bookmarked) as inspiration for future projects. Some of the best, cutest things I’ve done were born out of a Pinterest idea.

When I signed up for a project called The Perfect Stranger, I decided I wanted to make something. This project is just that you sign up and they pair you with a stranger, and then you send each other a box with gifts and trinkets. I thought it was a great idea!

Since we were approaching Christmas, I thought it would be great to create some Christmas potpourri with dried fruit and spices, and send it in a cute jar and packaging. I was confident I would make something awesome, but my first step was to find inspiration, and learn. I turned to Google, and Pinterest. Ideas on decorating the jar, on which fruit to include, but most importantly, on how to dry that fruit. I found a lot of ideas! If you check my DIY board, you can see the different links, along with many other ideas for future projects.

It seemed easy enough. I just needed to grab some oranges and apples, some cinnamon, nutmeg, and star anises.

The steps were also easy enough… Slice the fruit in about one-centimetre thick slices and then put them in the oven to dry.


Up until this point, I was confident. I checked the oven temperature and the timings, and decided that I was going to keep an eye on it, so that it didn’t become a disaster (because I’m that clever), so I sat down to read, and kept going back to the kitchen to check on the oven. Please, note that I was very tired from doing a 24 hours shift at the charity house!

At some point, I decided it would be a good idea to prepare the jar. Now, this wasn’t going to have any edible stuff inside, so maybe I didn’t really have to use boiling water, but I decided to be thorough, and tried to clean it as best as possible, while still keeping an eye on the oven.

And suddenly, the gods of Pinterest decided to play a trick on me and my kitchen started smelling like something was burning. I quickly opened the oven door, and a puff of smoke went up in the air. I took the tray out as fast as I could, making sure that the caramelised juice that I had just found had dripped onto the kitchen foil wouldn’t drip anywhere else.

To my dismay, it had already dripped a bit through the partition between the foil sheets, and onto the tray at the bottom of the oven, where it had caramelised, solidified, and burnt.

As you can see, the project didn’t go according to plan. I had to wait for everything to cool down before I could clean the oven and trays properly, because I was going to bake a cake right afterwards, so in the end, something that I thought would be quick, in and out of the oven, and on to project two, turned out a bit of a disaster.

I have to say that I started laughing because I should have known that the juice, that has a lot of sugar, would caramelise at some point if I wasn’t careful, but you know, we live and we learn.

So there you go, my very own Pinterest fail. Of course, I wasn’t on time to send my parcel to that person (sorry about that, stranger!), and I must report that I wasn’t sent anything either… But that’s not the point, the point is that I am now intrigued as to how do people make that work in the oven!

I still have two oranges left, and I’m tempted to try again, but I need to come up with a better plan. Do you have any suggestions?