Frosting Fixer

Went for a 20 minute walk on your advice and it genuinely helped within the hour. I'd assumed rest was the answer.

None of those, thankfully, just an ordinary ache. Good to know what the line is though.

You're doing it wrong, but the tip is also oversold. Two problems with what you've described.

First, the vinegar is going in with the detergent still in the water. Detergent is alkaline, vinegar is acid, and they largely cancel each other out, so half a cup of it in a full drum of soapy water is doing very little. If you use vinegar at all it needs to be in a rinse with nothing else in the machine.

Second, warm isn't hot enough and vinegar isn't the right tool anyway. What's in the towels is a mix of body oils, detergent residue and bacteria that live in it. The thing that actually removes it is oxygen bleach, sodium percarbonate, dissolved in genuinely hot water.

What worked here: wash the towels on the hottest cycle the machine offers with a scoop of oxygen bleach and no detergent, no softener. Then a second normal wash with a correct dose of detergent. Then dry them completely, straight away. Mine came back from that and haven't smelled since.

That grey is what was making the smell. Keep them fine by using about half the detergent you think you need and never using fabric softener on towels, it coats the fibres and that coating is what the bacteria live in.

Excess detergent is one of the main causes of this exact problem. It doesn't rinse out, it builds up in the fibres, and it feeds what's growing in there.

Honestly, the oven rounds matter less than people think. Two or three thin coats to get it started, then just cook in it. Fry things, roast things, do bacon. Six weeks of actual cooking builds a better surface than any amount of ceremony with a bottle of oil.

Ours turned out to be a piece of spring onion that had fallen behind the drawer runner in roughly February. No amount of powder was going to solve that.

Slicing before freezing is the practical bit I always skip and then regret when I'm trying to saw a frozen loaf.