Historically, the results of my culinary efforts have ranged from bland and unspectacular to unintentionally on fire. In 1999, I did make a batch of particularly good scones, but I owe that entirely to a good recipe which was easy for a novice like me to follow.
So last night, when I faced off against my kitchen, a short list of mostly organic ingredients and a recipe for blueberry muffins which I'd found online, I did so with a great deal of determination (if not with enough measuring utensils). With careful attention to the recipe, I felt sure I could manage to turn out something edible. The prep work took me twice as long as the recipe allowed. This is probably because I had to hunt down a couple of things at the last minute, and because I obsessively checked and re-checked the recipe approximately every 28.3 seconds.
After about an hour, I pulled a dozen golden-brown, lovely-smelling blueberry muffins from the oven. I had managed--without setting off the smoke alarm even once--to bake something from scratch. This was an event. Even the Ger-Man (who is a fantastic cook) was impressed.
Rather than rest on my laurels or move on immediately to making pumpkin muffins, I'm going to give the blueberry another try. Next time, I'll add some honey (the only sweetener for which the recipe calls is apple sauce). It'd be great to have a sort of "go to" muffin recipe on which I can build--throwing in blueberries, bananas, almonds or whatever else I happen to have on hand. Such a modular approach to cooking puts me in mind of IKEA, except that making muffins doesn't usually require an alan wrench.
2 comments:
Ooh, I want the recipe! Sounds delicious... baking always makes the house smell so good on a lazy Sunday. Ahh. :)
Remember those awful sugar cookies we made in McHenry? The recipe neglected to tell us when to put in the flour, so we ended up with a buttery, sugary mess, which we tried to eat anyway. I remember feeling so ill!!
The recipe is the one linked in the entry. In the comments section of that page, some people who tried the recipe suggested adding more liquid. The batter was a little thick when I made it, and would probably be unmanageably goopy had I used the suggested mix of white and whole wheat flours (I didn't have any whole wheat flour when I tried this).
I'll probably have another go at it this weekend, using white and wheat flours, adding a bit more milk and a tablespoon or two of honey to sweeten it a bit. I'll let you know how it turns out.
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