Adventures in baking

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, a much preferable holiday to celebrate than Columbus Day, although the coincidence of the dates is food for thought. 

We were invited to an outdoor, socially distanced Thanksgiving dinner.  The kids have been really rocking their baking game, so we set them to be in charge of our contribution, dessert. They decided to bake it today, rather than on any of the other three days that have passed since they last attended school (they do go to school on Fridays, sometimes!)

They were preheating the oven and came to me to see if I could figure out why it wasn't warming up. I tried a few things, then called in the actual engineer-type in the family. He also could not discover the reason, but we did confirm there was nothing that was easily troubleshooted (troubleshot?) We had a couple of options and had to decide how to proceed. The broiler would turn on, so whatever the problem was, it was at the bottom of the oven. We didn't want to disturb our landlord on Thanksgiving, and no repair person would be working today anyway.

One option was to ask a friend to use her oven. I would be driving her to the dinner, so figured if there's any risk of COVID or transference we'd already be taking risks with her. We decided to hold that for last resort.

What we did do, and didn't seem to go too badly, was to use the broiler to our advantage. We'd turn the broiler on to heat the oven and placed the oven thermometer where it was easily visible (note: the extra chore Zoltan did a month or so ago to clean the oven door was definitely paying off!) We put the cookies in and stationed one family member to keep an eye on the cookies/the oven thermometer, turning the broiler off/on or opening the oven door as the temperature wavered more than 10 F degrees in either direction. A few cookies got a bit browner on the top than ideal, but nothing burned and they all tasted as good as ever.

Creative problem solving for the win!