The Reflector Oven That Didn't Work

I picked up a copy of The Long Ago Lake at the thrift store one day.  It's one of those books that had been sitting on the bookshelf just waiting to be enjoyed.  So when I organized our own version of workboxes I included this book in one of the file folders.  My plan was to read a couple of pages and do the craft/project ideas as we came to them.

Bo wanted to choose from the workbox file folders the other day and this book was the one I had placed inside.  We read the first few pages and came to a project.  The project was building a reflector oven.  We were building a campfire that night to roast hotdogs and marshmallows on so I thought it would be a great night to experiment with a reflector oven.

Chris helped the boys build a reflector oven following the plans in the book with an old piece of tin we had outside.  Lou Lou helped me mix up a blueberry cobbler to cook in our oven.

We built a fire and set the oven on a cement block and put the cobbler on a cement block between the oven and the fire.  The heat is supposed to reflect off of the oven back onto the cobbler and bake it.  The cobbler sat for a couple of hours and was just barely cooked.  I wondered if it was because the tin was not shiny.  Chris suspected because of the dampness our fire just wasn't hot enough.  For whatever reason, we finished our cobbler in the real oven.  It was very tasty, but I really wanted this to work. 

We will try this again when we have another campfire.  Here is a link about reflector ovens and some recipes