New stove

Don’t you just love it when you have big plans for a project, and something interferes and ruins it all? About a week ago, I decided to bake some bar cookies for a friend, and all went very well at first. Before taking the pan out of our oven, I did the toothpick test, as suggested in the recipe, and it came out just right. I cooled the pan for a few hours and then began to cut the bars. Oops. They weren’t baked all the way through, after all!

Undaunted, I resorted to an old and trusted recipe for lemon bars, but I put a thermometer into the oven on a whim. Oops again. The temperature was registering a lot too low — which explains the previous problem. I adjusted the temperature control, and the lemon bars came out almost perfectly, thank goodness.

We’d been having a few “issues” with the stove, but I hadn’t really had a failure up to then. My husband said that we weren’t going to fool around with trying to get it fixed, since it was about 15 years old, so a couple of days ago our brand-new stove was installed! 🙂 This is the first time I’ve had a convection oven (it does conventional baking/roasting, too), so I’m sure there will be a bit of a learning curve, but it all seems very nice so far. The center burner grate can be replaced with a griddle, and that makes my husband happy, since he likes to make breakfast. Oh, and it has a temperature probe for roasting meat, so I’m very pleased about that, too. 🙂