I got the idea to make homemade cinnamon rolls from another blogger. I found a recipe that looked to die for good and Ella and I got to work on them this morning. Now, for those of you who have never made them homemade before, this is a more involved process than I had realized. You are pretty much making a sweet bread so you have to let it rise twice, once after you make the dough and once after you have the rolls cut.

We went through all the steps and they looked SO good. I smeared on the top the leftover butter/brown sugar/cinnamon concoction that I had left over from creating the rolls and I popped them in the oven. Yes, those of you who are smarter than me and not distracted by two young children probably just grimaced reading the second sentence of this paragraph. Why it didn't occur to me that the butter was going to melt everywhere is a mystery to me.

Ten minutes after putting them in I hear Ella yelling, "Mom, something bad!". Being in the next room nursing Gabriel (she was at the kitchen table coloring) I raced in expecting the table to be smeared with marker. Oh no, it was much worse. Thick black smoke was billowing out of the oven. I put Gabriel down in the pack n' play and told Ella to stand over near the door to the deck. Not sure what I was going to find inside I cracked open the door but the smoke was so thick I slammed it shut, turned off the oven, grabbed the phone to call Bob and herded the kids outside. I had no idea if the house was going to burn down.

I got Gabriel strapped into his bouncy seat on the deck table and went back in for a blanket. Ella was still chanting, "something bad, something bad" (this got very irritating after 30 or so minutes, let me tell you but thank god she yelled it that first time and got my attention) and I knew I needed to open the oven and get the buns out. I grabbed the pan, slammed the oven door shut and went back out to check on the kids. Realizing that the oven wasn't on fire I got the kids back in the house, began opening windows and called my husband. I left the mess in the oven for him to sort out.

It turns out that the melting butter and sugar dripped all over the inside and began to furiously burn, hence the thick smoke. My oven is now on self-clean and the cinnamon buns were ruined. I am so glad that things didn't end up worse but I am so disappointed that all that work was for naught.

Lesson learned, for sure! And another unexpected thing came out of this disaster: none of the smoke alarms in my house went off so clearly they need new batteries and a check. They are one of those things that I always intend to check but don't get around to. So, if you haven't checked your smoke alarms in six months, do it!