We recently watched a YouTube video featuring dessert recipes. I thought I would give making churros a shot. I mixed milk, water, salt, and oil and brought the mixture to 190 degrees. I then added flour and stirred it together to form a paste. As I was stirring, I suddenly began to feel as if I might faint. Chris finished the stirring for me and put the dough in a storage bag while I lay down.

Bringing mixture to temperature

Today I piped the dough onto a parchment-covered sheet tray. I intended to make a few for us to enjoy now and then freeze the rest for later. I’m not sure what happened, but when I fried the churros, they disintegrated into nothing. I attempted a second time with hotter oil, at Chris’s suggestion, with the same result.

My failure disheartened me. I am not sure if it was a bad recipe, if there were details to the formula not included in the video, or if refrigerating the dough overnight caused the problem.

Once upon a time, this failure would have led me to believe that I was a failure. Now I look at it as a part of the learning process. Not every attempt in the kitchen is going to work out.

Stirring churro dough

Since I found this recipe, I watched an episode of Cook’s Country, where they shared a recipe for churros that was very different from the one I used. Maybe I’ll see how that one works out.

On the positive side, in the YouTube video, they filled the churros with a “butterscotch” made from simmering a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of water for two hours. Chris has done this before, but this time experimented with sweetened condensed coconut milk. It made a delightfully sweet, thickened wonderfulness. He dropped some chocolate chips in the mixture for a wonderful treat.

Piped churros