Slightly-less-faux-Muffinery

Woot!

Made another 2 batches of Muffins on Sunday! (Am I on a roll or what? [yeah yeah, go snicker] )

Here's a blur pic. Sorry, but hands were too buttery and oily and zesty to manage a better one.
(Click the pic to see how blurry it is)

I made Coffee Walnut muffins (the darker one) and a modified version of the "Rich, Delicious Orange Tea Muffins", in that I added chopped peanuts. All just for my family to try out, since they like eating nuts, and one in particular really hates raisins. Which has nothing to do with the orange muffin recipe, since it doesn't have raisins in it at all, but I'm just saying..

If I had a picture of Batch#1 to show you, you'd have noticed that these are nicely formed, and symmetrical, unlike the gooey-Mr-potato-head types I made before.
Here's the secret - I used moulds. My turbo broiler is too small for the conventional muffin tray, so I managed to get my oily fingers on some tart moulds. Come see! (again, click the pic for a better view)
It was quite gratifying to see those suckers rise and brown nicely in muffin-like shapes...

And now, some random spot-the-cat-pics.

Aaaand, as a bonus, a What-the-hell-is-this-supposed-to-be pic.

heh! I should submit this pic to Engrish.com!

The almost-Muffin Man

Alas, the tumultuous life of the erstwhile muffin baker!


Apologies to my avid and crestfallen readers, for being too busy at work to blog, for I was... um, yeah, what I said.

Some of you might know that I caved in and bought a turbo broiler, since I was too broke to buy a full fledged catalytic convection oven, and also too broke to pay a carpenter for a cabinet to sit the damned thing in. Also, there's no space among the existing junk and detritus of my life's accumulated experiences to actually fit in a 55 litre oven.

For those of you who are kitchen-handicapped, a turbo broiler is nothing more than a big thermo-proof glass bowl with a heating coil and a fan. The coil heats up to a user-specified temperature, and the fan helpfully circulates the hot air around the bowl, thus cooking whatever is intended to be cooked. It's like a fan-assisted oven, except that it's round. And because it's round, I can't use a standard muffin tray!! :(
But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ahem.

So, after enjoying a few roast chicken/pork chop dinners and pizza snacks, I blackmailed Pepper for her painfully transcribed-until-her-fingers-wore-down-to-wrist-stumps Muffin cookbook, and greedily scoured the e-pages for a suitable guinea-pig recipe. I mean, of course, a recipe that I could easily try out, not a Guinea-pig muffin. Although, the e-book does have savoury recipes like for bacon and cheese muffins, so perhaps the idea of a guinea-pig muffin isn't too far fetched. Apologies to my vegan readers. Please be comforted in the fact that, in the end, I chose an Orange Muffin recipe, aka Rich Delicious Orange Tea Muffin. (there's no tea in it, it's for Tea).

Virgin baker that I was, and muffin-tray deprived, I set about halving the recipe and constructing silver foil muffin cup supports. Kinda like Madonna's performance bra, except much smaller. And I had 4 of them. And those cups wouldn't have been able to hurt anyone, unlike said person's bra cups, which could put an eye out. Serves the eye right for ogling in the first place.

So, virgin baker that I was, I muffed up the first half-recipe, in that I confused the full-recipe wet ingredient quantity with the half-recipe quantity for melted butter. While the first four muffins that emerged steaming from Muffin Forge™ looked slightly too bronzed (I had to adjust for time and temperature), they actually tasted a little too much like orange scones. And looked rather mutant-like, for muffins, since the dough was deficient in butter.

The second batch turned out much much better, moistrous (heh), more even, and less craggy. Tastier too (with that much butter, why not?). You could say that the first batch was rather like David Niven in the original Casino Royale, and the second batch like Daniel what's-his-craggy-face in the remake of Casino Royale.

So I shall present two sorry specimens to Muffin Mistress™ tomorrow morning for her disapproval.

Unfortunately for one particularly interested reader, this was all that was left... since i forgot to take more pics...