Welcome to the club, we've all got a box of those sad sticks in the back of the pantry. Mine were so dense you could've used them as doorstops. The real trick is getting that dough to actually puff up instead of just sitting there.
Hold on, wait. Doorstops? That's wild. Like, seriously? You could have propped open a window with those things? I mean, I've had some dense baking fails in my time (don't even get me started on my first attempt at bagels, yikes), but that's a whole new level of sad. It makes my "sad warm sticks" story feel almost cute by comparison. Now I'm genuinely curious what went wrong, was it an old baking powder situation or did you just overmix the heck out of it?