Do not try to warm the frosting on the oven’s venting burner.
That said, last evening, we had the great fortune for Claire McLewin to invite us to dinner. She was quite the entertainer. She slept in a variety of positions, including the “cuddled under the neck” and the “flat on back in both arms position”. Claire is about three months old now, so that’s the extent of her social skills for the moment, but her parents Scott and Melanie valiantly made up the slack, along with their cat that continually begs you to shoot an elastic band across the room so he can fetch it back to you so you’ll shoot it off again, and so on.
Scott made an excellent dinner and we sat around talking and playing with the baby. That is, Jess held the baby after dinner while Scott and Mel and I talked. I think we all got what we wanted out of the evening. Scott and Melanie discovered that they have a free babysitter just up the street from them, while I discovered whipped cream. These are entirely equally important in my eyes.
Jessica and I contributed strawberries and shortcake to the evening’s festivities (besides the complimentary baby-holding service.) Now, I know that such a thing called whipped cream exists, but I always thought it came in a red can with the word Reddi on it or in a tub labeled CoolWhip. Scott took cream and began to whip it with the mixer, added some syrups and such, and I’ve never had such tastiness. Light, fluffy, sweet. Sweet enough to make you sick if you ate a lot, but not make you sick quick enough to warn you before you ate too much.
When the evening ended, he sent the rest of it home with Jess, so naturally I showed up the next morning for breakfast. We had no milk for pancakes, so we decided to make cinnamon rolls. That is, Jess had me make cinnamon rolls while she went to do something else. And, her first mistake was to trust me alone in her kitchen.
You see, when I make cinnamon rolls at my place, I use that back stove burner that has the oven vent to warm up the frosting. The frosting has that little plastic tub, so you just set it there and let it warm up so it gets runny enough to pour all over the rolls.
Perhaps you can see where this is going.
Apparently, Jess’s oven vents more heat than mine does. I was reading at the table waiting for the timer to go off when I heard a noise strangely like a loud gasp. I looked up to see Jess staring at the melted remains of a cinnamon roll icing tub, which was slowly dripping into the burner pan. The plastic tub had begun forming around the burner coils. The metal lid of the tub had a rakish tilt to it while frosting continued to patter into the aluminum tray where it and the plastic rub mixed and semi-cooled.
Needless to say, it was a mess.
Luckily, we had some great whipped cream, which you can whip again into fluffy goodness. We enjoyed our rolls and I began the task of scraping congealed plastifrosting from the burner and tray, only to discover that some had escaped and made it down to the tray underneath the burners.
Finally, everything with the oven is back to normal, but I think Jessica is getting a taste of what everyday life with Wes may be like; newfound discoveries about everyday normal things accompanied with moments where all you can do is roll your eyes and clean up.
Next time, we make the cinnamon rolls at my place.
