Feel the burn

I tried to make homemade dog biscuits. I found a recipe online and (sort of ) followed it. I'm not sure if the oven temperature was wrong, I left them in there for too long, or because I used rice flour, but whatever the reason, half the batch got burned. Looking back at the setup, I'm pretty sure it was because top rack had a layer of foil over it. I previously wrapped one of the wire racks in foil to serve as a drip-collector; this usually rested on the bottom rack, out of the way. This time around, I didn't really think it through and ended up putting one tray of cookies on the foil-wrapped rack near the top, and the other tray on a regular rack just below it. I think the foil prevented the heat from distributing evenly through the oven, thus causing the cookies on the lower rack to get burned, and the ones on the top rack to be under-cooked.

The whole house filled with smoke when I opened the oven and caused the smoke alarm to go off briefly. I took the burned cookies out to the patio  and set the tray in the snow to let them cool and stop burning. I also opened up the patio door and other windows to air out the smoke.

Temba looked nervous when he smelled the smoke (or maybe it was because of the very loud smoke alarm) and started cowering. He first went into the bathroom and lay curled on the bath mat with his ears folded flat. Then he nuzzled the toy closet door as if he wanted to get a toy out. When I opened the door, he went into the closet and lay down among his toys, again with his ears flat.

It took him at least until the smoke was aired out before he felt comfortable enough to come out. I took him for a walk while the rest of the smoke cleared, and he seemed to be fine after that.