One of the huge downsides to blogging as a hobby rather than as a full time job? Time restraints.

Which means, for better or worse (ALWAYS worse) when a recipe goes belly up, I really don’t have a chance to go straight back to the drawing board until the next week.

And because I have the attention span of a four-year-old, I’m usually dreaming up something completely different by then.

One notable exception was my lemon pound cake. I literally made at least a loaf a week for a month…totaling seven loaves before I got one that worked.

Initially, I was trying for a lemon pudding type loaf similar to the one at Starbucks. Consistently, the damn thing kept falling in the middle…which isn’t always a huge deal except that it was always wet and gummy inside. Seriously looked like someone sat on it.

Just look at that ravine of frosting…

Only good thing that came out of this was a nice bread-bowl of icing.

It also tasted like pure baking soda. It was awful. By loaf number five I scrapped the idea of using pudding altogether because, despite being able to remedy the baking soda taste issue (the flavor of number five was actually outstanding), the loaf itself was still falling after about 10 minutes out of the oven.

So even after the final recipe was published, I thought I could re-visit the pudding cake idea. (What’s the definition of insanity again?). I figured I’d try muffins since they generally hold up a little more than loaves.

Aaaaand they definitely didn’t collapse because they were hard as rocks.

Seriously. Rocks. When I split this one by hand there was an audible snap. Not cute.

The whole point of putting pudding in stuff is to make it all moist and, like, pudding-y, right?

They did smell pretty nice, so maybe they’d make nice little air fresheners? Or lemony paperweights?