Cooking Doldrums

Honestly, I'm starting to get more than a bit disheartened with my last couple of weeks of cooking. If I believed in jinxes, I would say I was jinxed. I got the flu shot for the first time ever and promptly got a 2 week long cold.

I remade the pumpkin bread recipe that I raved about - half of the bread was perfectly cooked, the other half, when we finally got to it, was a mess of uncooked raw dough. After 65 minutes of baking!!! Utterly baffled. So sure that I mixed everything thoroughly before pouring it into the loaf pan.

I made pie dough - pie dough, something I usually do quite competently. This time instead of using all butter, I actually followed joy of cooking's recipe and used appropriate amounts of shortening and butter instead. I could not get the pie crust off the counter without it tearing into a hundred pieces. The top of my pie looks like I took a bunch of pie dough scraps and flung them haphazardly over the surface - which is basically the only thing I could do.

Not even cooking related, I tried to make one of my friend's a baby shower present. Yep it also got ruined.

I am getting to the point where I am afeared of baking. I hate to put in the time and effort and love, not to mention the cost of ingredients, and come out with something disappointing or inedible.

Is there any glass half full optimism to this situation?
I finally tried the new york times gluten-free pumpkin dumplings recipe and have to say, pairing them with a coconut milk/masala was pretty darn genius. But I think the recipe could be improved a bit by actually cooking the dumplings in a soup/stew/masala rather than in boiling salted water. And/or adding cumin/coriander to the dumpling dough itself. The recipe did let me use up a large delicata-type squash rather than using canned pumpkin. So I suppose that's a small plus?

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