The late Johnny Carson used to joke that there was only one Christmas fruitcake in the entire world, and nobody ever ate it -- people just kept sending it to each other. I found out a few days ago that dry pasta does not have an indefinite shelf life. I tried boiling some macaroni that had been sitting in the cupboard for longer than I could remember. It had a taste and texture somewhere between wet newspaper and vulcanized rubber.
I can't count the times I've mixed up cinnamon and cumin. You'd think I'd learn to actually look at the label, but no.
See, I never think of these great ideas until after it's all said and done! I'd have probably served them with rum, just to dull the pain of losing one's teeth biting into them. According to my mother, I come from a fine tradition of such things. When she was younger, she baked a batch of biscuits that, in her own words, "were the prettiest things you ever did see". They weighed a little on the heavy side, though, and she said she tossed a biscuit against the wall to see if it would bounce and it went right into the wall! She said there was a biscuit sized hole in the wall for week! Her mother (who was an old fashioned country cook and in fact did live in the country) had once made a batch of muffins, and upon discovering how incredibly hard and rock solid they were, threw them out. Well, one night, she heard this loud crackling sound and thought someone was pelting their house with rocks. So my grandfather runs outside with his shotgun to see what it could be, and all she can hear is laughing. She comes outside and looks, and these old hound dogs had found the muffins and were crunching on them. My aunt called and said she could hear them at her house, which was in the next field over (about a hundred yards away).