
But in this case, a canister of raisins at the store isn’t that expensive, and my hope of turning the past-their-prime grapes into something usable seemed to not work at all. Will I save money? If there’s good money savings, I might press forward and see if I can fix what went wrong. It was both boring and frustrating at the same time. The challenge can be enjoyable! But this raisin project? Meh. Was this project fun? Some projects (believe it or not) are still fun for me even if they fail. I’ve shared a few other of my failed attempts which I call my half-baked ideas because I’m often hopeful I can learn from what went wrong and make some corrections (and turn it into a “fully baked” idea!)īUT, it’s also important to look at any failed project and decide if indeed it’s worth pursuing any corrections. So the final result for one pan was hard rock balls and for the other pan was sticky globs. Now you would think that grapes that were already a little dried out, would just get really dry and shriveled in the oven, but instead mine puffed up into balls that were hard as a rock. And this was really my hope anyway with this project – that it might be a way to make use of grapes would have otherwise been thrown out and turn them into raisins in my oven. The real surprise though was that I did one little pan of grapes that were already a little shrively and past their prime. Are they supposed to still look kind of grape-like when you take them out of the oven? And then let them shrivel up some more? Again I dunno. Yes, the grapes were a little shriveled, but they still looked more like grapes than raisins, so I let them go another hour or so longer. How hard could it be?Īfter two hours there really didn’t seem to be that much progress yet. Put some grapes on an oiled pan and let them go for several hours at a low oven temperature of 250 degrees.


But honestly, I didn’t think it would be that hard to screw up. Now, I’m not ruling out error on my part. The final result was sticky little blobs that looked a little bit like raisins, tasted rather yucky, and left me with pans that I sure hoped I could scrub clean again. But currently it’s a gadget I don’t have and so I decided I would just give the homemade raisin project a go in my oven. If I would ever come upon a nice dehydrator during my thrift shopping, I would snatch it up in a minute because I think it would be a fun gizmo to play around with. And I guess that’s why I came up with the bright idea that if I like to always have raisins in my cupboard, maybe it would be fun to make my own!Īfter a little research, it looked like this could be done in the oven which sounded like a good plan to me as I don’t have a dehydrator. Lately I feel like I’ve been going through a lot of raisins at my house, probably because I like to sprinkle a generous handful on my oatmeal every morning.
