#7: Ignore the Smell of Something Burning...Another Culinary Catastrophe

      So, one of my hobbies is baking. That is partly why so many of my embarrassing situations involve baked goods. Now, it was my Freshman year, and I had promised a couple of my guy friends some brownies. One of them had requested "Rocky Road Brownies," which I had never before made, but I was up for the culinary challenge.
     This particular day of baking happened to be the first Saturday of October, which meant General Conference. Everyone in the dorms congregated to the lobby to watch it, and during the 2-hour break between sessions, I went downstairs to the dorm kitchen to bake my next masterpiece.
   Everything went well--I had everything I needed and things were going smoothly. Now, Rocky Road Brownies required a technique I had never used before: you bake the brownies until they're almost done, and then take them out. You sprinkle marshmallows on top, and then set the oven on "broil" and bake the brownies for 2 minutes (according to the recipe I was using) and then walla! you have a beautiful chocolate delicacy mixed with the glorious taste of roasted marshmallows. I followed the instructions: marshmallows+broil. It wasn't too complicated.
   While the brownies were completing their incubation I started to clean up. Not long after washing some of the dishes, I turned around and noticed that white fumes were coming forth from the 70's looking yellow oven. Now, since I had never used the "broil" setting, I figured that maybe the oven just maybe emitted white vapors when that setting was being used. (I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed in the common sense department then...) I went back to washing dishes. About 30 seconds went by when a nagging feeling compelled me to check on the brownies, just in case.
    I opened the oven door. To my utter horror, instead of Martha Stewart's next cover feature, my brownies had undergone a chemical transformation and I beheld 9x13 inches of what appeared to be newly formed volcanic rock in my glass baking pan. Just like that, I had gone from Bon Appetit to National Geographic. Then, 2 seconds later, due to the new rush of oxygen caused by my opening of the oven door, the whole pan erupted into flames.
   Now, no one had ever taught me what to do in this kind of emergency. I couldn't just take the pan out--I would get burned. I couldn't throw water on it--it was inside an electrical appliance. So, I opted for plan C: do nothing. I stood there against the kitchen wall, wide-eyed, watching my dessert complete its utter apocalyptic destruction. Eventually the flames died down, and my brownie a flambe was left a black sizzling pile of the best archeological digging site since Pompeii. Then, I did what I usually do in situations like this: I burst into hysterical fits of laughter.
   After I'd had a good laugh, I ran upstairs to grab my friend Reba. The next session was about to start, so a good group had gathered together in the lobby. I frantically told her that I had burned the brownies, and she hurried back downstairs with me, where we were greeted with a nose-retching stench of smoke. The brownies were still in their same magma-like state. I think I tried to take a bite because the middle of it still looked almost edible...but my taste buds quickly told me that there was no saving this one.
 

   To end the tail in a nutshell, I have never made those brownies since, I try to avoid cooking things that require broiling, and that kitchen smelled like smoke for the next several weeks.