Baking mishaps

The kids and I baked carrot cake at school last Wednesday afternoon. I brought my own round pan but the crazy thing about this pan is it leaks a bit if I didn't use an electric mixer for the batter. True enough, it started dripping the moment I put it in the oven. This oven, by the way, is a character. It looks like it belonged way back to the jurassic age. Small, stained, scratched and rusting, it certainly had seen better days. It still works, which is what matters, but a single drip from the batter landing on the sooting wire at the bottom would mean smoke coming out from the oven.

I solved the problem by getting rid of the wire rack and using the rectangular baking pan for support. I was about to give myself a pat on my shoulder when I realized it would take time for the cake to be done this way especially the middle part. What the heck, I'll put it over the wire rack again in a while when it has hardened a bit, this I told myself. That's exactly what I did except that when I put the wire rack with the pan on it, the right edge got dislodged. To my horror, almost half of the still liquid batter was spilling all over the bottom! Sure enough, the entire school was right away profused with smoke. It was everywhere even when we opened almost all the windows to let the fresh air in.

Then the school's caretaker rushed inside with this wild look in her eyes. She was yelling something like "where is it, where is it?" in Czech. Where is what? In her barrage of words I only caught one that sounded like electricity and got it. She thought the school was on fire! I shook my head and tried to tell her in my elementary Czech that there was no fire but there was no stopping her from running around the room desperately looking for the faulty wire. I stood in the kitchen waiting for her to come and calmly opened the oven when she did. Next thing I knew, she was bursting in hysterical laughter.

In between fits of laughter she told me the teachers from upstairs were alarmed of the smoke and called her to check. When I told this to A, he said it would have been really something if one of the teachers called the fire brigade and they would come to hose the school down with water. I'm glad all the drama didn't end this way.

Despite everything, our carrot cake still emerged near perfect and was a hit among everyone who tasted it.