Oh, yeah. Thankfully you didn't burn down the house. Here's one of my more stupid fiascos:
I decided to bake a cake, the coffee cake that my husband calls crumb cake. Since the amount of batter I usually make doesn't fill up the pan and the baked cake is fairly thin, I decided to multiply the recipe by one third. I had a new can of baking powder. The amount of batter looked good in the pan. About 20 minutes into baking I started to smell burning, but I figured it was what was burned on the bottom of the oven from before. We hadn't cleaned it for a long time. The stove we had at the time had a self-cleaning oven, but the latch was broken, so we had to take the top off of the stove to engage the self-cleaning part of it. So we hadn't done it.
About 30 minutes into the baking, I decided I should check the cake. Normally the cake would be done by then, but with the 3rd more, I figured it should take at least 10 or 15 more minutes. Plus, it was still smoking some. The batter had bubbled over the side of the glass 9 X 13 pan. The entire side of it was covered completely. It was dripping from the bottom of the pan like streams of pancake batter. It left burned dropped mounds on the oven floor. It didn't spread all over the oven floor, but burned in drops, all along the front, below the pan as well as all along the back, below the pan. I poked the cake with a toothpick. In the center there was a crusty surface, but it was liquidy below the crust. The ends were sort of bubbly. I went to tell my husband. We decide to cook it for a little longer and see what happened. When I got back up stairs and checked the cake again, on the right end, the batter was bubbling so much it looked like it was boiling. I let it cook another 10 minutes. The toothpick test told me it was done.
I took it out, turned the oven off and set the cake to do what it would. The center was sort of caved in. The ends of it were higher, like the cake had fallen. When the oven had mostly cooled I decided to see how easy it was to get the burned batter droplets off the two racks. It came off easily. Next I got a metal spatula and scraped the burned batter droplets off the floor of the oven. They all came off easily, to my surprise. I then scraped off the burned on stuff. There seemed to be some along the back. Closer inspection revealed that the place where the two sections of the oven were seamed together, now no longer were. In fact, some of the metal had burned through. There was a gap a good inch wide and maybe 3 inches long. Part of the metal was jagged. I put my finger back there and could stick it into that long hole. I could feel the insulation. I have no idea how long it's been that way. Wow. So my screw up with the cake actually may have saved the house from burning down.
Back at the cake I decided to cut the burned cake batter off the side of the glass pan. Most of it wasn't very burned. It tasted like crunchy cookies. The cake doesn't taste bad either. It had the texture of muffins.
Thankfully we had the stove from my husband's former house, waiting in the back of the garage.
Such was my experience with how to boil a cake.
