The Gingerbread Volcanoes

It's Foodie Friday!  Huzzah!

This week's topic is moreso a bit of a story, rather than a recipe...

Let's start off by clarifying that yesterday was not my day.  Nothing monumentally disastrous happened, but a series of annoying events led to me feeling like I just didn't want continue with the day and rather fast forward to the next.  

So towards the beginning of the day, after a few annoyances happened (one incident being stabbing a hole in my kitchen faucet by accident), I decided that I would resort to something that made me feel like there was order in my world, and would take my mind off things.  I decided to make gingerbread.  I've done this annually for a few years around Christmas.  I found this great cake-y recipe that is just simply delicious.  The recipe is certainly not complicated either.  So I set out to start the baking.  All goes well, and I even decide that I'm going to make individual serving sizes instead of one big pan.  I figured I could work it with the mindset of cake vs. cupcake and deal with baking times and filling up the baking dishes in that manner.

I put all the little mini gingerbreads in the oven set on a baking pan, and I set the timer.  My mom calls in the meantime and we start having a conversation about all the annoyances of my day.  Mid-conversation, the timer goes off.  This was just meant to be a check in time anyway.  Still on the phone, I throw on an oven mit and open the oven...

Thank goodness I put a baking pan under those bad boys, because gingerbread was pouring over the sides of the dishes like hot lava down the side of a volcano.  

If you look carefully, you can see the explosion.  

All I did was stare at it for about 30 seconds, closed the oven door, and walked away.  In all my years of making the gingerbread, it had never risen to such heights, and had never cascaded over.  I told my mom what had happened and basically she giggled at it.  

Fortunately, when the gingerbread was done, I tried it, and it actually came out very well.  It's just going to be a nightmare when I eventually have to clean those dishes.  Hardened molasses-based gingerbread will be a scary ordeal to clean off...  

All in all, I can't wait to sit down with the gingerbread to have as my dessert.  I'm just really happy that I only have to scrape off the crusts from a pan, and not from the bottom of my oven!

Have you ever had a silly baking disaster?