Food Network Recipes That Celeb Chefs Wish They Never Made

Sandra Lee’s rise to fame came from her series of cookbooks, as well as her show “Semi-Homemade Cooking,” which aired on the Food Network from 2003 to 2011. Unlike other celeb chefs, Lee used pre-made ingredients with the goal of bringing easy recipes into America’s kitchens. She often followed the 70/30 rule: Use 70% store-bought food and 30% that’s from scratch. While this strategy invited derision from other celebrity chefs — Anthony Bourdain reportedly once called Lee the “frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker” (via Delish) — the show was a hit.

Despite her success, there is one recipe over which Lee has expressed regrets. Her infamous Kwanzaa Cake debacle began when she made the dessert for her December 2003 holiday special. The recipe used store-bought cake, frosting, canned pie filling, and Corn Nuts, and it garnered a lot of attention — mostly negative. Years later, the recipe’s true creator penned a scathing piece for HuffPost, wherein they disowned the Kwanzaa cake recipe and asserted that Lee had terrible taste in food.

Lee also regrets the recipe, although she never addressed the questionable culinary decision of putting Corn Nuts on a cake. According to New York Magazine, it was “the only [backlash] she has taken to heart, and that she changed how she does what she does because of it, not, mind you, because it missed the culinary mark but because of its racial implications.”