A little bit about baking fails

My baking has failed a couple times. I even failed to make cookies :((
Sad... so sad... Here are the failures from the last few months...

So I made carrot cake. Which, when you think about it; 1 slice = one serving of vegetable. Therefore: 5 slices = 5+ a day.

 Grated carrot; so much easier done with a food processor.

 Into a lined tin.

Oh this recipe is from Edmond's cookbook which I got for my 14th birthday

It comes with cool stickers like these, and so many good recipes, just not the carrot cake one :P

Looks okay?

But it did not rise.
I had my doubts when I poured it in the tin, because it didn't seem like a lot of mixture.

Still, I iced it with cream cheese icing. The cake was good, but it did not rise. Where did I go wrong?

Next I tried chocolate sponge cake.

Tips for making sponge cake:
Sift the dry ingredients 3 times to make the cake light.
Once poured into the tin, tap it to get any bubbles out and place it in the oven.
Do not test with a skewer, it will release the air. Instead, when lightly touched, the cake will spring back.
I followed these tips...

and made simple buttercream icing too for the middle.

2 cakes with icing layer. But. . .
Once again did not rise.

Where I went wrong:

I think I didn't beat the eggs enough, and the eggs weren't at room temperature which affects the volume when beating. Either that or it was the tin itself, since I used the same one for both cakes.

I also made russian fudge and that failed. I didn't know how to do the soft ball test, where you drop a little mixture into cold water and it should form a soft ball when it's right. And I didn't beat the mixture well enough. It tasted good, but it just did not set.


And the latest fail was caramel chocolate cookies...

I was trying a new recipe that uses vegetable oil instead of butter. But I didn't have vegetable oil, so I used olive oil.

I chopped up jersey caramels, you can get these from Pick n Mix section at most grocery stores, and the other half of the energy chocolate block from my wheat free chocolate cookies.

You can tell from the dough that it was too oily... Maybe I put too much oil in it?

The cookies looked fine, but the olive oil was way too fragrant and made the cookies taste funny :/
What could I have used as vegetable oil substitute that isn't olive oil?

And to conclude,

I'm still striving towards that goal of being the mother who makes really awesome birthday cakes for her children and the grandmother who always has home baking in the vintage biscuit tin.
Ain't nothin stoppin me!

Signed,

Elisa