What’s the burnt smell, honey?

Last Sunday morning, I offered to take our female dog, Little Dipper, to McDonald’s for coffee and a $1 sausage biscuit.  Not that they’re spoiled, but Little Dipper and our male dog, Dusty, share a sausage biscuit most weekends.  

Dusty stayed home to guard the house and Mark. 

Mark said he would “do the cinnamon rolls,” and  I left just as he was spraying Pam onto a cookie sheet.

 When I returned, I was met with four toasty, warm, freshly iced cinnamon rolls.  Mark took two; I sat down with one, and nibbled on my second one throughout the afternoon.  I noticed a slightly burned smell in the air but didn’t think much of it because the cinnamon rolls were perfectly brown. 

For dinner, Mark heated the oven to cook some wing-dings.  Within minutes, I noticed a burnt smell coming from the oven.  I commented to Mark and he said that the blueberry pie he’d cooked recently hadn’t oozed, and shrugged.  I didn’t give it another thought until I saw steam—or was that smoke?—coming out of the oven vent.  I opened the oven, saw that the bottom had some blackened blobs here and there but since nothing was bubbly or smoking, I shrugged, closed the door and turned on the fan.  The wing-dings were done a few minutes later, Mark removed them, shut the oven door, and we ate.

 It was only after dinner when we were cleaning up that I got another whiff of the burnt smell.  I turned on the light inside the oven and saw at the very back a three dimensional coil of carbon that could only be a cinnamon roll.  I called Mark over and when he saw it he said, “You know, I thought I’d iced 5 cinnamon rolls.  I put them back in the oven to keep them warm until you returned, and apparently, when I went to go pull them out, the fifth one got left behind.”  

What’s odd is that we don’t worry about events like this.  In fact, it made us smile.  See, the first dinner I made for Mark went up in flames because we got distracted as only young lovers do.  The burned cinnamon roll reminded us of the pork chops of our younger days, when burning food wasn’t any more important than having a clean oven.  I’m glad some things never change.  I just hope we don’t burn the house down.