Ever followed a recipe step by step and still ended up with something completely unrecognizable?

That same thing happened to me the other day. I’ve said here that cooking isn’t for me, and I gave it up years ago. But from time to time, I like to see if my cooking skills have somehow arrived, and usually they don’t. This last time was no exception. The original plan was to bake a chocolate cake for my best friend’s birthday. Simple, right? The worst part is that I’ve done it before, so I was really confident.

I got all of the ingredients. Mind you, this was not a box cake recipe. This is a chocolate cake very similar to the one from the movie Matilda… very soft and chocolatey. Anyway, it seems simple. Mix eggs, sugar, vanilla, etc. It called for some unusual ingredients, but I added them all and followed the recipe exactly as the TikTok video showed me.

So far, so good. The problem came a few minutes ago, during the first moments of baking. The video said it was important to preheat the oven, so I did; then I lowered the temperature and put the cake in. In that moment, I realized I don’t have cooking skills, and probably never will. The cake burned on the outside and was raw on the inside. Completely raw, like a chocolate soup…