Burning Down The House

It’s not like I have a cooking disaster every day. Or even weekly. Or monthly. Considering how much of my life is spent working in the kitchen, I’d say that I have a fairly good track record. Maybe like an A-. Or B+, at least at the moment.

Here’s how it went down. I have a half-batch of cream cheese frosting in the fridge. That won’t always be true. So I figured I’d use it. I have this cookie recipe (total girl cookies, Scott won’t touch them) called melt-aways, which are butter heavy and frosted with cream-cheese frosting. So I whipped up a batch, but the dough was way crumbly — not even clinging together enough to make a ball. So I added some more butter, and it whipped up all gorgeous. I rolled out 72 tiny tea-cookie balls and baked at 350 for 10 minutes. Then I looked.

Oh, my.

Not so much “cookies” going on here. More like a sideless pan of white dough swimming in butter.

Remember the “sideless” part? Yeah. So there’s butter rolling off the pan, and dough sliding off to join it, and my oven is starting to stink like burnt sugar and a great deal of butter.

So I pull the pan out, switch off the oven, and hit the Clean cycle. If you have never done this, you may not realize that it was a large mistake. Within three minutes, I had my kid and his buddy staring in wonder at the flames leaping inside the locked oven.

Flames.

Yes.

And now there’s the stink. Burnt sugar and scorched oil was nothing compared to this disaster. So now I’ve sent the boys outside to breathe clean air, opened all the windows, turned off the heater (see? I was thinking a little) and hidden in the office, where the strategic corners have left the air slightly less toxic.

Yeah, We all need a day like this to remember that we are not, in fact, in every way fabulous. (I just don’t think I need these days quite so often.)