The Recipe Test

I have to admit to getting hooked on a reality TV show - Masterchef Australia ( who knew there were so many ways to cook a kangaroo ? ).

The series is basically about a bunch of amateur cooks who are set a series of challenges and whittled down week after week until there is a winner.
A recent episode made for great blog material.
The challenge was for the four cooks left in the competition to come up with a recipe - and then write it down so that a home cook could follow it and make the dish.

All four finalists were great cooks, had delivered some amazing dishes and thrived under pressure. Putting this skill and talent onto paper proved to be a very difficult task.

The rule of the challenge was that the home cooks had to follow the recipe, they could not use their own initiative. Very simple mistakes caused large problems for the people trying to follow the recipes.

One mistake was that a recipe said to use 'juice' but juice did not appear on the list of ingredients. So what flavour of juice ? How much ? The recipe writer had removed it from the list of ingredients but forgot to remove it from the recipe making instructions.

Another recipe which was for a 3-layered cake came unstuck because although it said to divide the mixture into 3 it also only specified using 2 baking trays and so the home cook ended up with a 2 layer cake.

The contestants found the task difficult, the home cooks found it confusing and the judges found the results inedible...