VeganMoFo Day 22 – Food Flops

Today’s prompt is “Silly Food” and while I couldn’t really think of anything silly that I eat, I thought I’d show a different side to being a food blogger. Now, I certainly don’t claim to be the best blogger – nowhere near – and my photos aren’t professionally done, but I can just about make my food look good. Sometimes though, that can make it seem like it’s effortless getting great looking food. Look on instagram at all the beautiful meals everyone eats…and then look down at your plate, and wonder what happened?

Well, it’s not true. My food doesn’t look any better than anyone else’s – I just take lots of photos and learn to arrange my food in pretty ways! I don’t go to the extremes that some do – I know of food bloggers who will photograph their dinners cold, so as to avoid steam, but who has time for that?

For today’s “silly food” prompt, I thought I’d share with you some of my less pretty food photography, my food mishaps, examples to demonstrate just how silly food photos can be!

Let’s start with one I call “How on earth do they do this?!”. This is from when I made Millionaire’s Shortbread and I was beating the fudge topping after cooking. I thought I’d take a photo to show how it is done. I forgot I only have two hands. At this point, the fudge was thick, the saucepan was sliding all over the counter, and I was also trying to take a photo with my camera. Beautiful, right?

Here we have “Forgetting about the Blinds”. I could claim the stripes in this photo are trendy, some new light source thing, but really, it’s because I have slatted blinds in my kitchen and I forgot to pull them up before taking the photo. This is from my Banana Muffins, which were tasty and not actually stripey.

Here is a gross looking one for you. This is my Gooey Cheese Sauce in the making and doesn’t it look delicious? Ok, no it doesnt’. It looks gross. But actually, it’s one of my favourite cheesey sauce recipes, and when I was writing it up for the blog I tried to do a step by step. That didn’t work because it just looked icky in the making. That there is tofu, nooch, garlic, and broth, which gets blended and turns out much nicer.

Here is one called “I hate this bowl”. This is my Borlotti Bean Soup which is so easy and so tasty. I was given these cute bowls that say “soup” on them (with plates that say “bread”) on them for Christmas. And I was so excited – they’re adorable and surely now I can make pretty soup pictures for my blog! Not so fast, girl. They’re black bowls, very black bowls, and my camera does not like that. It turns out that I can get a great picture of the bowl and never a great picture of what’s inside the bowl…

Here is one called “All The Steam”. Your camera, you see, like any other bit of glass, will steam up when going from somewhere cold (the living room) to somewhere hot and humid (the kitchen). When I grabbed my camera from the arctic temperatures in the living room to snap these Pea and Courgette Fritters, I ended up looking like I’d photographed them in the fog. Not a great look.

And we make so much mess. Food is messy, especially when you’re baking, especially when it’s chocolate. These Peanut Butter Cups were lovely but not exactly tidy. Chocolate is a nuisance to wash up too, and you can see it all over my bowl in the corner of this picture! Bonus camera strap also hanging around.

Finally, here’s an all round terrible photo of my samosas. It’s blurry, for one. The counter is dirty, with bits of samosa crumb and flour on top. My feet are in the picture! As is my kettle, my salt, my kitchen scales, and half the cooker. Bonus for the oily kitchen roll under the samosas.

Now, none of the food in this post tasted bad. In fact, it all tasted really rather good. Sometimes, it can be hard to see past ugly looking food and feel bad that yours isn’t quite pretty enough. But I hope this shows that food can look however it likes and still be pretty amazing tasting!