Smoked Breakfast Breads

I'm about to wrap our oven with yellow caution tape, since it has become chokingly painful that neither Scott nor I should operate the dang thing.

**cough**

It all started a couple of days ago when Scott had a little breakfast incident involving an angel food cake pan and some sticky bun sauce that went amok. He smoked up the joint. In his defense, he was in the bathroom for most of the damage. I heard the drips sizzling in the bottom of the oven and never thought to grab a baking sheet to control the damage. We opened up all the windows, turned on the ceiling fan, and waited it out. It was really bad for the rest of the morning, but basically not noticeable when we got home from work.

Then tonight I felt compelled to make mmmmmuffins. Before I even started cooking, I called Scott to ask if the oven was safe. In a word, he said no. But he assured me I could either scrape out the gunk or spray oven cleaner and let it sit for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes when they're craving muffins? Not me! So I set out scraping the bottom of the oven. I used dry paper towels and my finger nails to get out the big chunks, and wet paper towels to wipe out the sticky mess that remained.

And then I turned the oven on. All the way up to 400. And I started mixing my muffins... and smelling smoke. But it wasn't too bad. I figured it would just need a minute or two to cook off whatever I missed. I apparently missed a lot, including the sticky mess on the actual oven racks. While I didn't have the big plumes of smoke Scott had, I once again found myself opening all the windows, turning on the ceiling fan, and joining the cats out on the balcony for some fresh air. What a mess!

Actually, I think that despite my misadventures in cooking, they may end up tasting ok: regular muffin mix with a spoonful of cherry pie filling in the middle. I'm calling them "cherry bombs" but if they suck, I'll just call them "smoke bombs" in honor of our apartment!