A recipe for disaster

A typo in an apple cake recipe sent four people in Sweden to hospital this week. What dubious recipes have you come across?

Scary spice? Nutmeg should certainly be used sparingly. Photograph: Corbis

We've all made kitchen mistakes and later blamed the recipe (or the oven) for unintentionally flat bread, charred roasts, or soup-like cheesecakes that refuse to cook. But, now and again, the recipe is at fault, as in the recent case of the Swedish poisonous apple cake.

In this case, there was no mistaken identity (henbane or fat hen, Antony?). The fault was a typo, and the poisonous culprit was well-known store cupboard spice, nutmeg. Twenty whole nutmegs a cake, specifically.

I know - when it comes to cakes - that slavishly following quantities in the recipe is the right thing to do. But, surely, you'd have to suspect there was something wrong here.

For a start, nobody has 20 nutmegs lying around in a jar, and you'd spend maybe £10 buying them - probably more than all of the other apple cake ingredients put together. Then, how long would it take to grate 20 of them? And, while a sprinkle (or two pinches, as the apple cake recipe should have called for) of nutmeg is nice, what would a cake with 20 nuts' worth of the stuff taste like? I'm guessing it would be inedible.

Assuming you'd got this far, how would anyone be able to eat enough of the finished cake to overdose and end up with nutmeg poisoning?

But - stones and glass-houses - maybe we shouldn't say any more about typos.

There have to be dozens of other examples. Have you come across any dangerously misleading recipe errors? And what did the results taste like, if you got that far? Or, have you introduced your own errors to recipes with spectacular results?