Food Tip: Don't Overload the Oven!

Today this is just a quick food tip:  DON'T OVERLOAD THE OVEN!  It leads to poorly cooked, or burned, food.

Take for example the cinnamon buns I made recently for our early morning guests. 

Since I awoke at 3 AM and did not seem able to drop immediately back to sleep I got up and went through the whole process of making cinnamon buns.  By 5:30 there were two pans ready to go into the oven.  One was a half sheet pan with fifteen buns on it.  The other was a quarter sheet pan with seven buns on it.

Because I was finally beginning to want to go back to bed, I decided I would cook them both at the same time.   I put the half sheet pan on the top rack and the quarter sheet pan on the lower rack.  Bad idea.

The tops were just fine and the buns in the half sheet pan were barely okay.  The quarter sheet pan bun bottoms were just past okay, moving towards burned.  Sugar does go from fine to burned in not time flat, so you have to watch anything with sugar in it.  Lesson learned?  Maybe.  Hopefully.


A second bad idea was to set the oven timer for the amount of time the recipe called for the buns to cook.  I should have set the timer for five minutes LESS and then checked them.  Well, buns are supposed to be nice and brown. I can say that these were brown all right...