Lion and Magic Boy

Now, as I have said before, I am an excellent cook.

Really.

There have been times, however, when things have gone awry. Seriously awry. For instance, the Meatloaf Debacle of 2006, or the time I cooked a turkey with the bag of giblets still inside (I wondered where those damn things were!), or cranberry sauce that refused to jell.or any number of cakes I have made whose layers slid off the one below and look as much like anything Martha Stewart turns out as do the pothole repairs on my street.

Then there’s the problem with fire. I have set aflame any number of potholders, and no Thanksgiving is complete without at least one application of Weleda Burn-Care. (Good stuff, that. I highly recommend it.) And naturally I have burned my share of broccoli and pancakes.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I found out that the smoke detector works. I was broiling a steak and apparently it caught on fire. No problem, it went out, and it was even (mostly) edible. So sue me, I was a vegetarian for 15 years.

Today I decided to make cinnamon swirl bread. Yum! One of the recipe variations was for individual cinnamon rolls. Even better! Though I generally ignore recipes and use them as a rough guideline, a “suggestion”, if you will, I decided that with this I’d be more precise. So, recipe it was.

This recipe instructed me to divide the dough into 3 equal pieces. Check.

Then I had to roll each piece to an 8 x 9 rectangle. Check. Sort of. It’s really more an oblong. But check.

Then I had to take 1/4 cup butter (I knew this was half a stick, I TOLD YOU I’m an excellent cook! An excellent cook would know these things!), and slice it thinly and place over the dough. Uh…….check?

Is that 1/4 cup butter FOR EACH PIECE OF DOUGH? Or divided among them (as if anyone has a clean surface large enough to roll out three 8 x 9 rectangles? I don’t)?

Hmm. Shit.

Okay, it made the most sense that each piece needed to be covered with butter. There’s no way 1/4 cup will cover three pieces of dough, at least, I don’t have the knife that will slice butter that thinly. Okay. 1/4 cup butter per piece it is. Check.

Next mix 1 teaspoon cinnamon with 1/4 sugar and sprinkle over. Check. I already knew the answer to THIS one, we covered that with the butter. Obviously it’s one batch of cinnamon-sugar FOR EACH PIECE OF DOUGH, even though I saw my stash of expensive but very worth it cinnamon dwindling rapidly.

So. Butter (a lot). Check. Cinnamon (also a lot). Check.

These better be good.

Roll up, slice, and bake 10-12 minutes. Check. Damn, are you getting hungry? Maybe I should post the recipe. I’ve already had a request for the recipe for my granola bars. Hmm.

Anyway.

Fast forward 10 minutes. I’m busy checking my site counter stats my email, and I hear the bell for the timer on the oven that I figured out how to operate. Yay, me! I wait a bit longer, sensing somehow (I told you I’m an excellent cook — we excellent cooks have this intuitive sense about cooking, you know? Like the food is calling to us, saying “I’m done now!” or whatever the hell it says. You know?) that it needed another minute or so.

Fine. I wait the minute. Then I enter the kitchen to remove the proud beauties from the oven, wondering idly what is that smell? and then I see it. Clouds of thick, black, toxic smoke, belching forth from my oven.

I open the front door to air things out a bit, then remove the cinnamon rolls, remarkably unharmed and still slightly underdone, and discover that all that butter, we’re talking a stick and a half, has melted and formed a carcinogenic lake at the bottom of my oven and has morphed into black noxious smoke that is now pouring out of the oven in a toxic cloud reminiscent of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

If I had used, say, margarine, which isn’t even a food, I would understand. But this was butter! The wholesome, creamy gift of goodness from happy cows! How can butter turn into something resembling a mixture of toilet cleaner and bleach that hung in a pall throughout every room in my house? I had to open every window for hours, crank up the heat, and still it smells of chemical nastiness.
The cinnamon rolls? They’re fine. Just slightly underdone, like I said. And, well, buttery.

But what worries me is that the smoke alarms never went off. A little steak-smoke, and they’re bursting our eardrums. But butter-cancer? Not a peep.

If I find out the smoke alarms are made by Land O’Lakes, I’m moving.