Mennonite Weekly Review

My blog today is going to feature the latest Mennonite news! Sweet little Mennonite ladies all over the US, but mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana are busy baking calorie-laden Christmas goodies!

OK ... now back to Amish Highway 35 ... today I wanted to bake these yummy peanut butter blossom cookies. Several weeks ago I found a bag of Brach's chocolate stars, and recalled fond memories of my Mom baking cookies and then I would get to put the star in the middle of the cookie! I confess that I have never really enjoyed the process of unwrapping a gazillion chocolate kisses to make peanut butter cookies, so I was really excited about finding the bag of Brachs stars! As my first batch of cookies was baking, I grabbed a newspaper off the top of the recycling pile (because that's what good Mennonites use when baking) and when I layed it on my counter, it was the Mennonite Weekly Review! I thought "how appropriate"!

Two dozen of these beauties are going to be delivered to Bethany this afternoon. I volunteered to bake cookies for this months' winning classroom in the Box Tops for Education competition. The winning classmates get to enjoy them tomorrow.

One small baking detail happened today that I forgot to mention. When I slid the last tray of cookies into the oven, I slid a little too quickly and in about 5 minutes I distinctly smelled a burning cookie. I opened the gas oven and sure enough, one was nicely baking/ burning on the bottom of the oven. I opened the window a crack and removed the silly brown-bottom cookie. Soon the timer went off and when I opened the oven to remove the batch and there was about 2 inches of flame shooting up through the bottom of the oven and I could easily see a cookie that had escaped down into there burning like there's no tomorrow. YIKES! I grabbed the baking soda and just threw it into the crack that the flame was shooting out of. It quickly went out, and I opened the window a little bit further. When I went back to the oven to clean up the baking soda mess, I could still see a glow through the bottom of the oven (the bottom that is screwed fast and can't be removed quickly). OMG!!! I started throwing the entire box of baking soda into every one of those cracks that I could ... still glowing! But I couldn't see through the cracks well enough to get a good glimpse of what I thought was another escapee cookie! I called Dave and told him to get his butt home on the slippery roads and I told him I was going to call 911! I started throwing pitchers of water into the oven hoping to somehow splash the water onto the glowing cookie. I kept thinking of the fire extinguisher in the garage, but didn't want to leave the "emergency"! I called 911 as I'm throwing about the third 2-qt. pitcher of water into the oven. The nice 911 lady calmly asked me questions ... like "is the oven turned off?" Uh, no ... I turned the oven off and the "glow" slowly went away! The glow had been coming from the flame of my TURNED ON gas oven! Phew! About this time Dave arrived, I was shaking and sweating, and kind of smiling that embarrassed kind of smile. We opened more windows and started cleaning very wet baking soda out of every crack and crevice of that oven! There was also a tad bit of water that was running down the basement wall underneath the oven. But I did learn an important lesson ... baking soda really does work and never panic! You just can't think clearly when you panic.

So that's about enough excitement for me for the rest of 2009!