Do you know how frustrating it can be when baking is your passion and you don’t have an oven?  VERY!!!  Two weeks ago, just as I was rolling out the pastry for Howie’s birthday pie, my oven ‘short circuited’.  Literally.  The control panel fritzed out and the room filled with an electrical burning smell.  But that wasn’t the worst.  The worst was the ear piercing beeping sound blaring from the oven.  Might I just mention that for safety reasons there is no way to turn the beeping sound off.  I had eight people coming for dinner in less than five hours and I had no oven.  Yes, there are worse things, but at that moment I was struggling to think of one.  Hours later a repair person arrived and informed me that my oven panel was shot.  What a surprise!  The only good news – he was able to shut off the oven’s main circuit breaker which stopped the annoying beeping.  I baked the pie at my neighbor’s house, finished the dinner on the barbecue, and everyone had a lovely evening in spite of the broken oven. Continue reading →