Cookie Mystery

I have a cookie press with several seasonal disks. Whenever a holiday or a new season rolls around, we like to share the shaped spritz cookies with teachers and neighbors. I use the cookie gun to press out all the cookies at once, before the dough consistency gets weird. I shoot out 60 cookies on my four cookie sheets. Our current oven is extra large, and I can fit two sheets, side by side, on one rack. So, I only need to bake two rounds of cookies.

With this week being the first week of Fall, Evelyn suggested making some orange leaf-shaped cookies. No problem. The recipe I use is tried-and-true, with awesome results every time . . . except this past Tuesday. The first round (two sheets) of cookies came out fine. The second round, however, were so burned that the smoke detector went off - with three minutes still left to bake! There was no way we could give those away.
Julia and I tried again this morning to bake orange leaf cookies. The picture below says it all - all four sheets of cookies came out golden and perfect. I don't know what went wrong a couple of days ago, but Evelyn will be happy to know we can give away cookies after all.