How do I rescue a dessert that has gone wrong?

Savoury cooking is forgiving because seasoning can be adjusted at any point. Desserts are chemistry that has already happened, so the useful question is usually not how to fix it but what else it can become.

Safety

Step by step

1. Work out whether it is texture or flavour.Flavour problems — too sweet, not enough salt, flat — are correctable. Texture problems usually are not, and the answer is a different dessert rather than a repair.
2. Rescue a split ganache or chocolate sauce.Add a tablespoon of warm cream or milk and whisk hard from the centre outwards. It usually comes back. A stick blender fixes what whisking cannot.
3. Fix seized chocolate with more liquid, not less.Counter-intuitively, seized chocolate is rescued by adding a tablespoon of boiling water at a time and stirring. It will not return to tempering but it makes a perfectly good sauce or ganache.
4. Sieve or blend a lumpy custard.Through a fine sieve, pressing with a spoon, or a few seconds with a stick blender. If it has actually scrambled rather than thickened unevenly, it is not recoverable — that is cooked egg.
5. Turn an unset mixture into something pourable.A jelly, panna cotta or mousse that will not set becomes a sauce, a drink or a layer in a trifle. Trying to re-set it by adding more gelatine to a set portion rarely works evenly.
6. Turn a collapsed or dry cake into a trifle.Cubed, soaked in fruit juice or sherry, layered with custard, cream and fruit. It is the standard answer and it is genuinely good rather than a consolation.
7. Turn a dense cake into truffles.Crumbled, mixed with a little buttercream or cream cheese, rolled and coated in chocolate. Dense cake is better for this than good cake.
8. Turn a cracked cheesecake into something served in a glass.Cracks are cosmetic. Cover with fruit or cream, or spoon it into glasses in layers with biscuit crumb — which is a deliberate dessert in its own right.
9. Turn a weeping meringue into Eton mess.Broken up with cream and fruit. A meringue that has wept or cracked is unimprovable as a pavlova and perfect crushed.
10. Turn overcooked or grainy ice cream into a milkshake.Blended with milk. Icy or grainy texture disappears completely and nobody knows.
11. Deal with an underbaked centre honestly.A raw middle in something containing egg should not be served. Cut the cooked outer portion away and use that, and discard the rest.
12. Cover rather than reconstruct.Cream, fruit, a dusting of icing sugar, or a jug of custard alongside. A great deal of dessert rescue is presentation, and nobody at the table knows what it was supposed to look like.
13. Say nothing.Serve it as though it was always going to be a trifle. Announcing the failure is the only step that makes it worse.

Tips

• Keep a tin of custard and some cream in for exactly this. Between them they rescue most dessert failures into something people are pleased to eat.
• Photograph what went wrong before rebuilding it. It is usually diagnosable later, and it stops the same failure recurring.
• Desserts that failed on texture almost always taste fine. That is what makes repurposing work.

Common mistakes

• Trying to re-set a partly set mixture — Adding more gelatine to something already setting gives a rubbery layered result. Turn it into a sauce or a trifle layer instead.
• Returning a cooled underbaked cake to the oven — The outside burns long before the centre cooks. Cut the cooked portion away and use that.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask