Getting Melted Plastic off the Stove

I messed up in the kitchen today. While cooking, I placed the plastic spatula beside the stove and it slid onto it unnoticed. When I saw it, it was too late - the edge of the spatula was already melted, leaving both the spatula and the stove a mess. I was pretty panicked, I mean, I just melted one pretty expencive (tupperware....) spatula and there was a melted puddle of it on the stove top..! My desperate tries to get it off while the stove was still hot were useless, it somehow didn't seem to move at all. 

So I turned off the stove, let it all cool down until I could touch it and then I tried to figure out how to get that plastic stain away from the stove. And here's what I came up with.

You will need:

* Baking soda or Cream of Tartar (some sort of chemical base that isn't going to cause damage if it ends up in your food)

* Vinegar (lemon juice should work too, since it's just an acid needed)

* some sort of hard object (e.g. a plastic spatula for a ceran stove, or a blunt knife for those ridged stove tops)

* a spray bottle

* a sponge or dishcloth

Sprinkle some baking soda onto the hardened plastic puddle, making sure to cover the edges. Fill the spraybottle with vinegar and spray some of it onto the soda. This will form some bubbles. Use the hard side of the sponge and rub over the plastic stain until you can't see the baking soda mixture anymore. Don't worry if it doesn't come off that fast, just keep repeating this and use your fingernails and a plastic spatula or blunt knife to try to scrape the plastic off the stove top. It took an hour for me to do this on one of the ridged stoves, so be patient. 

But what about the melted spatula? Well, if it smells like burnt plastic, you should better throw it away. In my case, the spatula didn't have any weird smell. So I carefully cut off all the protruding edges around the melted tip of the spatula with a utility knife and used sandpaper to smooth it all out. And it actually looks pretty exactly like it did before, except for the fact that the spatula is now slightly shorter. That was one quick fix and the spatula is working fine again. 

I hope I could provide at least some of you with a possible solution for this very nasty problem. Have a good day ^-^