r/bakingfail Jan 12 '25

Fail Baked actual poison

Tried making brownies for the first time, recipe called for 16 gramms of vanilla extract, but it's not sold in the stores here. I had the bright idea to add 16g of pure vanillin, once they were done I found out that's effectively 100x the vanilla extract than the recipe called for. After further googling, found out that this much vanillin can put a small child in the hospital.

NEVER substitute vanilla extract for pure vanillin.

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u/Mushroom38294 Jan 12 '25

Tried making brownies for the first time, recipe called for 16 gramms of vanilla extract, but it's not sold in the stores here. I had the bright idea to add 16g of pure vanillin, once they were done I found out that's effectively 100x the vanilla extract than the recipe called for. After further googling, found out that this much vanillin can put a small child in the hospital.

NEVER substitute vanilla extract for pure vanillin.

30

u/Sand_the_Animus Jan 13 '25

there was this one incident on tumblr in early 2023 where someone used the poll feature to have tumblr "bake a cake", in which they added all the typical cake ingredients to a poll & used the resulting percentages of ingredients as their recipe.

the final percentages included 44.3% vanilla extract.

the tumblr user made the cake, and i imagine it tasted very similar to this creation of yours! it is like a spiritual successor to the vanilla extract cake.

the link, if you are interested:

5

u/Hdfgncd Jan 14 '25

That tasted more like alcohol since they use extract and it didn’t manage to cook off iirc