It was hot this week.
The heat dome set new temperature records in communities across the province, including Cranbrook, as the mercury broke 40 degrees C on Tuesday, June 29.
Knowing that the heat wave was going to continue throughout the week, I cooked up an unconventional confectionery experiment.
Frying an egg in withering heat outdoors is a tired cliche, so I went with something a little different.
Everyone likes chocolate chip cookies, but with no oven at the Cranbrook Townsman office, I had to improvise.
Luckily, my Toyota RAV4 was able to do the trick.
And now we wait. pic.twitter.com/ED4if6kvBD
— Trevor Crawley (@tcrawls) June 30, 2021
Anyone who sits in a vehicle for extended amounts of time during hot days knows how fast the interior heats up, especially if there’s no air conditioning.
So I took a cast-iron pan and some cookie dough and harnessed the power of the heat wave to do what it does best — bake the hell out of everything.
The cookies went into the ‘oven’ — the front of my dashboard facing the afternoon sun — at 12 p.m., on Wednesday, June 30.
For three hours, the cast-iron pan sat in direct sunlight, heating up the metal and that soft, doughy goodness contained therein.
According to Environment Canada, outside temperatures reached a maximum of 39.4 degrees.
Were I a smarter man, I’d have purloined one of those COVID-19 temperature guns we have in the Townsman office to check the temperature of my car’s interior.
Alas, the regret of missed opportunity, but anecdotally speaking, it was uncomfortably hot inside that vehicle while the cookies were baking, I can assure you.
By about the second hour the cookie dough was starting to harden, but since I needed to fully investigate the efficacy of my baking method, I left the pan inside for another hour.
Just after 3 p.m., the cast-iron pan came out and sat on a counter inside an air-conditioned office to cool down, as is standard operating procedure when baking cookies.
The incredible thing, is it worked.
In fact, the cookies were probably over-done.
There was no softness, or runny under-baked and melted dough.
The cookies were fully baked by the heat of the afternoon sun, which is hilarious on one hand, but also a stark cautionary example of how hot interior spaces have gotten during the heat wave.
However, next time I get a cookie craving, I think I’ll stick with a conventional oven.