Tonight, instead of going to the Dinos B-ball or to a movie with Boyda and David, I decided to stay at home and bake buns...quite the endeavour. I looked up recipe online, mixed ingredients together with yeast, waited an hour for it to rise, punched it down, then formed the buns and let them rise...all the while waiting for the rising dough by watching TLC and dreaming about when I have kids... Too much TV for me lately...so no TV tomorrow afternoon (We're having a movie night tomorrow). Anyway, The buns rose, I followed the recipe and turned the oven to 400Fahrenheit...then placed the buns on the 2nd lowest rack and turned to do the dishes.
Roughly 20 minutes later, I turned to grab some more dishes, and what should I see but a furious column of smoke streaming from the oven vent. I squeaked a sound of alarm, ran to pull the battery out of the smoke alarm (no other sound bothers me more!!!), then took the smoking 24 out of the smoky oven. Windows open, doors to rooms closed and oven fan on, I evaluated the state of my baking. To my dismay there was about a 0.5cm layer of pure blackness on the bottom of every unfinished doughy blob. Since I was determined to get them baked, I cleared away the smoke and put them back in...then realized 2 minutes later that it was probably because the buns were on the wrong rack that they burned...so I moved them to the top.
For some reason when I took them out golden brown I expected the bottoms to be "repaired" and bronze-coloured...but they weren't. My attempt to prove myself as a baker seemed to have failed...I reflected on the shortbread cookies of Christmas 2006, and added to the picture the charcoal buns I had introduced into the world... Home alone, I phoned Mom. In the process of the conversation we concluded that it was not my fault entirely...apparently the internet isn't a very good source of recipes, with the 400F heat and whatnot. Also, the rack situation... should have been higher. And we don't have a convection oven like Betty Crocker and Jean Pare... I get off the phone and prepare to put the buns in bags...and realize we have no extra bread bags or large Ziplocs. As I grabbed some large margarine containers an idea came to me. Cheese grater! Cheese grater. Garbage below, bun in hand, grater ready, I grated off the layer of black for each of the 23 buns (I ate one). There were crumbs everywhere!!! It took me a very long time to clean up the mound of useless scrapings, but the cheese grater thing worked like magic! Now the bottoms are only semi-black! Yay! Edible and bearable. I'll enjoy them anyway. We'll dismiss the weird stains on the cookie sheets that aren't scrubbing out. I don't think I'll be baking buns again for at least a month--this experience was too painful.
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