A couple weeks ago, I decided that Sunday dinner needed to be apple pie. Yes, dinner on Sunday is weird at my house. Anyway, in my ongoing quest to remove shortening from my cooking, I looked for and found a fabulous pie crust recipe that used butter. Really yummy--you need the recipe. So, I put together my pies (beating off little fingers throughout the whole process) and I put them in my oven and pretty soon my kitchen started filling with smoke. All, those fabulous chunks of butter in my crust were melting and spilling to the bottom of my oven. Plainly I need a little more practice with this recipe. Being who I am, I turned off the top oven, turned on the bottom one, transferred the pies and continued to bake them. We aired out the kitchen, ate our pies and went to bed.
Monday morning I started the self clean cycle on that top oven. About 2 hours into the cleaning cycle I walked through the kitchen and noticed that the electronic display was completely blank. I thought to myself, 'maybe that's normal and it will all come back on when it finishes cooling down.' I didn't really believe myself, but it gave me a couple hours of stalling time. Eventually though I had to admit that the oven felt pretty cool, but still had no display. I tried the fuse box. Nothing. I went to Google. I looked up my oven and 'self cleaning problems.' I got a lot of hits. It seems that everyone with a Kitchen Aid double oven has had this happen. (I shouldn't pick on KitchenAid here--if your oven is made by whirlpool--and that means pretty much everyone whose oven wasn't imported from Europe--then don't trust the self clean cycle!) That evening we pulled the oven out of the wall. And when I say 'we' I mean Kris, Kegan, Rhys and Bayley. You probably never really thought about it, but a wall oven can be removed from the wall, well, cabinet really (it is helpful to have a few teenagers around when doing this). After removing the back panel, we decided we were not qualified to go further and Kris called a repair guy the next morning.
Repair guy, also known as Dave, got here Thursday morning, two new fuses in hand ready to fix my oven. His timing was good, since we were scheduled to feed the missionaries that evening and the planned meal was lasagna, french bread and salad with a lemon cream cake for dessert courtesy of Erin. Notice how everything but the salad really required an oven. Well, Dave got those parts switched out, Kegan, Rhys and Kris helped lift the oven back into the cabinet and we prepared to bake! Erin's cake was first, we started to pre-heat the oven and she started to beat together cake batter. Pretty quickly we noticed that the oven smelled a little odd. A little like Dad's old electric train used to smell--not a good sign with any electrical appliance. If it smells like Dad's train--turn it off! Except I didn't, because I thought the smell would go away. What went away was all power to my oven. And we had four cake layers ready to bake. So Erin and Aislin carried cake layers across the street to bake at a neighbor's house and Dave came back to visit. And my oven was sitting on my kitchen floor again. Dave's diagnosis? The control panel was fried--actually a piece of it, but you can't replace a piece of it, it all comes together. So, he ordered my part, put my oven back in the cabinet, and I made fajitas for the missionaries. We still got the lemon cream cake though, and it was awesome! You probably need this recipe too.
That cake was the last baked item we consumed in this house for another week though. Because the panel Dave brought on Friday and completely installed turned out to be a dud straight out of the box. Once it was all installed, I switched on the power and.... nothing happened. He was at my house for two more hours looking at every connection in the blasted thing. And there are a lot of variously colored wires criss-crossing one another and connecting here and there in an oven. But everything was good the only thing it could be was the brand new panel. We had to order another panel and wait all week for it to finally show up. The first one we got in just one day, but apparently it takes longer if you want a functioning one. So, Thursday night, a week after the original repair job, we pulled the oven one more time and this time when I switched the power on the oven made a beautiful beeping noise and the panel lit up. It was a very exciting moment for the whole family (and Dave too). It was even more exciting later when we baked our first batch of chocolate chip cookies in two weeks.
