Muffins

As with many food lovers, I’m sure, my first experience with food was baking with my grandma. Baba and I would make bread and buns, where I would furiously pound down the dough with my little fists, cookies and, on occasion, we would even make doughnuts. I remember that we even made playdough on the stove top, which always kind of sucked, but was fun anyway. After all that childhood experience, you’d think I’d be endowed with superior baking skills.

As it turns out though, I’m not much of a baker. The recipients of some of my baked good may beg to differ, but baking and I don’t particularly get along. As much as I love the idea of the science involved in it, that there may in fact be a perfect harmony of ingredients and temperature that will yield the best baked good, that even altitude plays a role; I simply don’t have the patience for it. I can’t be bothered to measure things exactly. I don’t have a food scale. Actually, that’s a lie, we just only use it to weigh Harrison. I have difficulty following a recipe step by step. I don’t like that you can’t lick a finger of raw batter to determine whether the result is going to turn out right. Well, most of the time, anyway. Which is why I often delegate these types of duties to Shannon, who will meticulously follow a recipe to its every detail and yield predictable results every time, where I would be batting .500 (which is great for baseball but horrible for food).

This is why I love baking muffins.

They just seem so much more forgiving than most baking recipes. The basic recipe is so simple that it can be committed to recipe after a few repetitions and it’s easy to make substitutions to suit your needs. Want to make it healthier? Substitute some all-purpose flour for whole wheat or bran, use an artificial sweetener, sub the oil for Olestra ™ and have leaky stools. The choice is yours. Substitute banana or zucchini for some of the liquid. I have no idea why this works, but it does. Add fruit, add nuts, add whatever your heart desires. It’ll likely turn out. You don’t need to dirty several bowls to cream together the egg and sugar. You don’t even really have to measure anything that well. Brilliantly, eggs even come pre-measured for you! How much easier could it get? My only major complaint with muffin making is that I have a habit of not greasing the tins very well. I have sort of developed the skill of a highly trained archaeologist from carefully prying those things from their bakeware.

A muffin is basically cake. A muffin, to me, is not breakfast. Unless, of course, you consider cake breakfast. Muffins are, however, delicious. So, make some. A basic muffin recipe looks like this:

That’s it. Unfortunately, toothpicks don’t work like oven thermometers, so you can’t just leave them in there. They’ll burn. I don’t know of a better way of testing muffin-doneness though.

A recipe like this is supposed to make at least a dozen muffins. I’ve seen some people say that it’ll make about 18. That is because these people make bad muffins. Those recipes call for filling up the muffin tins 3/4 full and baking off little stumps for 15 minutes. If I’m lucky, I’ll get 9 muffins out of this recipe. I fill those tins up to the brim and then they puff up and spill over, forming an actual muffin top, which everyone knows is the most desirable part.

If you want to add fruit, add about a cup of it and mix it with the dry ingredients first to coat. This prevents leaking and explosions, for the most part. I recommend firmer berries (blueberries or cranberries being my favorite). Buttermilk gives the muffins a fluffier texture. Since I rarely have buttermilk in the house though, you can add a tablespoon of lemon juice to the milk and get a similar result.

I prefer blueberry-bran or lemon-cranberry. Feel free to fire off some variation suggestions. What’s your favorite type of muffin?