Among those of us who enjoy working in the kitchen, the ecstasy of it all can sometimes break out in agony. I’m talking about recipes that flop.

There were the eggs that curdled in three tries at the same recipe. That recipe had such promise – it sounded so good, it worked so well until the part about curdling – that I had to keep trying, until I was finally defeated. It was something baked, that’s all I remember, because I wanted to forget. Not knowing what it was, I can’t be tempted to try it again.

Then there was the two-ingredient dessert, an elegant, delicious, surprisingly simple thing I learned from my mother-in-law, a gourmet cook long before everybody with a pepper grinder claimed that status. She grew artichokes. She pickled walnuts from her own tree. She entertained. Who would ever guess that her Coffee Jelly (a fancy rendering of "gelatin") consisted of one pound of plebeian marshmallows melted in two cups of strong coffee?

In my young-wifey days and later too, I made Coffee Jelly to crown many a meal of, say, Austrian Veal Goulash and Noodles, Paprikasalat, and some side dish or other; I was a devoted disciple of this mother-in-law and tried to imitate her dinner party triumphs.

But time passes, and products change. After sharing that recipe in print recently without retesting it first – I hadn’t made it in ages, but how could one go wrong with two dumb ingredients? – I was horrified to hear that the wondrous dessert had morphed  into a gummy, icky-sweet creature that nobody liked. Eventually we learned from the marshmallow manufacturer that those puffy little critters are now made by an extrusion process that requires a different formula.

So we retooled too, told everybody to cut the marshmallow component to ten ounces and leave the coffee at two cups. Now they’re happy. But for me, that dessert is a thing of the glorious past, when marshmallows were molded, not extruded. It’s all over between us.

Karyl Bannister writes and illustrates the newsletter Cook & Tell, published ten times a year.