Muffin Madness

It's been nearly a month since my last post, which I just realized as I logged in for today's entry.  Where does the time go?  To the corporate overlords, plain and simple.  Work has kept me quite busy, and fairly stressed out lately.  While I've been keeping up my new year dedication (not a resolution - those are destined to fail) to healthier eating with a decreased reliance on convenience foods, I have noticed myself slipping a little bit this past week.  I hit fast food twice after work this week after avoiding those places for months (every once in a while, I would grab something that was pre-decided, but rarely).

I've also been trying to keep up my nails with fun color, since when I'm mentally exhausting myself during the work day, I like to look down at my nails and have something to smile about.  Is is weird that a good manicure can boost my mood during a tough day?

So, while I've been spending time at work and letting my nails dry, I haven't been keeping up the blog like I'd like to.

However, I have been inspired.  Gina over at Skinnytaste.com may not realize it, but I semi-stalk her.  Earlier this month, I was on a banana bread kick, and tried out two different recipes in single serve and two serving portions.  The problem I found with the recipe I made into 2 serving portions (using mini-loaf pans), was that I seem to be physically incapable of only eating half of the loaf.  Those are in the freezer and are a bit of a treat on those low-point days.

Onto the inspiration.  I was sitting at work toiling away and fantasizing about that banana bread, but wishing it were fewer points (the 2 servings together are 11).  I had also just eaten my lunch - 1C of oatmeal with chopped apple and maple syrup (easier to throw together in the morning than a sandwich, when there's nothing in the freezer).  I was thinking of making an oatmeal fruit bread, similar to my lunch but with leftovers.  Later that day, while taking a short sanity break, I checked Skinnytaste.com and found the recipe for Insanely Good Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins.  I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and had chopped up strawberries and blueberries in the fridge.

Naturally, I had to hit the grocery store to pick up some things first.  I didn't think I had enough honey at home and didn't trust the applesauce in my fridge to still be good.  Long story short, the baking was delayed until last night, at which time my berries were dried out and sad looking.  Quick change - apple pie muffins instead.  I substituted chopped up apple for the berries and added some apple pie spice to the dry ingredients.

 I'll admit that sometimes I get intimidated by lengthy ingredient lists, but this recipe is really rather simple and easy to follow.  

Ingredients ready for assembly

Since the first step in the recipe is to let the oats soak in the milk for about 30 minutes, it gave me time to prepare all the rest of the ingredients while the oven pre-heated.  Once the oats are sufficiently soaked and the wet ingredients are mixed, everything comes together quite quickly. 

Ready for the oven

Normally, I would worry about filling a muffin-tin to that level with the batter, but since the photos in the recipe page showed this level (and the finished product), I was okay with it.  And you may be wondering what all that liquid is on top of the muffin-tin.  One of the recipe steps was to spray the tin and liners with oil.  I had never done both steps before, but after reading the comments, saw this to be integral.  I used non-stick cooking spray.

Pretty!

This is the first time I've baked something that didn't rise up and out over the top of the pan to the point that you have to destroy them to remove them.  I guess actually following written instructions has its perks.  Of course, since it's me, I had to do something stupid during the process.  This time, when I slid the muffins into the oven, I realized that I hadn't moved the racks to their usual positions (I had planned on putting these on the rack in the middle position, but had forgotten that I'd moved that rack to the top position to broil something earlier this week).  My solution was to bake these on the top rack for the first 11 minutes and then move them to the bottom rack for the last 11.  Result - some of the muffin bottoms are a bit over-done.  I'm not sure if this is due to the rack issue, or the fact that while I was mixing the ingredients, the pan was on top of the hot oven waiting to be filled.  I need a larger kitchen, or more inclination to keep the counters clutter free.  Normal people probably will not get this result.

The first taste

The verdict:  Moist and tasty.  I will definitely be making these again, and trying different fruit combos.  It has a good oat flavor and a subtle sweetness.  The big apple chunks cooked up well, and there's a nice fruit to muffin ratio.  When I first folded in the fruit, I was afraid it wouldn't be enough, but it is.  

To circle back to spraying the liners with the oil...you do not want to skip that step.  These muffins come out of the liners completely with no precious points lost to the wrapper.  That is so important to a Weight Watcher's member, since I know when I have counted points for an item, I am eating every morsel, even if it means gnawing the crumbs off of that muffin liner (I'm not proud).  From the recipe comments, you will want to use liners because otherwise these tend to fall apart when removing them from the pan.  Other comments have remarked that the muffins bottoms tend to be rather wet, but dry by the next day (I didn't have this issue, but I'm "special").

I may be smuggling one of these in to The Hunger Games later for a WW-Friendly movie snack.  

Kitchen Nightmares

I swear that if anyone decided to film my life for a reality show, I'd end up being portrayed as completely inept, dimwitted, and comically clumsy.  Really, these oddball occurrences only happen once in a while, but it does seem like I've been extra-blessed in the kitchen catastrophe department over the past few weeks.  Here's some of the wacko things that I'm talking about:

1)  I had a can of refried beans fall on my head a few weeks ago while rummaging around in a cabinet.   The can was on the counter over the cabinet where I keep my casserole dishes and tupperware.  My cat had been getting up on the counter and I think she must have nudged the can to the edge during one of her forays, because I can think of no other explanation for how that can could have possibly fallen on my head.  Other than poltergeists, and I really don't want to think about those in my apartment.  I also don't know how the can could have been perched that precariously on the edge of the counter without my noticing it.  Regardless of how it happened, it hurt like nobody's business!  The very bottom edge hit me right above my hairline and I did have a little bump from it.  Luckily, it didn't fall far before impact.

2)  I burned myself pulling a dish of homemade macaroni and cheese out of the oven.  Not the brightest, but also the most normal of my incidents.

3)  Last weekend I managed to burn myself while doing the dishes.  The tap water from the hot side has been scalding hot lately, which I knew when I started the dishes that day.  I must have had a lapse, though. While moving a pan under the stream I wasn't careful enough and ended up burning my wrist right under the thumb.  It hurt bad enough that I felt it through my whole body, stamped my foot on the floor and swore.  (Sorry Mom.  It happens.)  It was hot enough that it was a bit red and warm to the touch for the rest of the day (it looked like a mild sunburn, but didn't last long).  Right after it happened, I was so mad that I tested the water temperature with a meat thermometer held in the stream of running water.  150 degrees (beef, medium rare).  I had been meaning to report the temperature of the water to the apartment complex office for a while, but the burn prompted an actual irate call.  I also reported the broken garbage disposal, since I had to leave a message anyway.  Next day, the hot water is merely hot again, without being hot enough to physically endanger the young, elderly, or simple-minded.  The garbage disposal is still broken, but the drain is clear again.

4)  Yesterday, I had another dish washing incident.  I received a vegetable slicer for Christmas, and was cleaning the components for the first use.  I was planning to make scalloped potatoes with a giant sweet potato that I found at the store.  All necessary parts were washed, and I had taken special care not to come in contact with the extra sharp slicing blade (it ate up my poor sponge).  I was drying everything on my flour sack towel and made one last and nearly fatal (by which I mean not really even close to fatal, but not very bright) swipe with the towel, catching my middle fingertip right in the blade.  Amazingly, there was no blood on the towel.  But that sucker bled like a mother.  The cut wasn't that deep - maybe a millimeter - but it seemed like it bled forever.  And each time I thought it was finished, it started up again.  Then of course I started thinking too hard about it (Do I need stitches?  Should I see a doctor?  How clean is that towel?  What if it gets infected?).  I had to lie down and look away from it for a few minutes, to stop myself from giving in to the irrational panic and because I was feeling a bit faint.  Then, as I was getting myself a bandaid to keep myself from looking at the wound, and to keep from bleeding all over the place, I made the mistake of trying to assess the damage and started to feel faint/queasy again and had to lie down.  Did I mention that I hadn't eaten yet either?  That probably didn't help.  Anyway, I was so irritated at the slicer (and myself for being a dork) that I nixed the potato idea and moved on to something simpler and faster.

5)  Today, less actual physical damage to myself...but it did involve that vegetable slicer.  I decided not to hold a grudge against an inanimate object due to my own carelessness, and was preparing the scalloped potato recipe.  The white sauce was completed on the stove waiting for the potatoes to be layered in the pan.  I had already re-washed the blade component, without touching it, and didn't bother drying it.  I popped it into the top of the slicer and started slicing up the humongous sweet potato. This slicer has a container attached to catch the sliced veggies, and I was holding it in my hand instead of using it on the countertop.  Naturally, the whole slicer somehow catapulted out of my hands, crashing to the floor and distributing an even layer of perfectly sliced potato disks across the tiles.  I managed to keep a nice tight grip on the potato, though, and hadn't sliced more than 1/4 of it before dropping the container.  So, all was not lost.  Of course, it delayed my recipe prep and the white sauce ended up thicker than ideal, since it was sitting on the stove during this time and the aftermath.  I had to spread it over the potatoes instead of simply pouring it, as called for in the recipe.  The sweet potato produced enough liquid during cooking that it didn't seem to make a difference though.

Cut to my reality show after the inevitable editing process, and it goes something like the following scene from Frasier, only without the dating or the ironing:

Birthdays, Ball Games and Bad Baking

What a busy, busy weekend!  And the week has continued in the same busy fashion...  I am going to need this weekend to recover.

Saturday was my nephew's 2nd birthday, and my step-sister threw him a party.  He is very much into tractors right now, so that was the party theme.  My mother and Caroline created this cute cake for him, and he was very happy to see the vehicles on it.  (Every time he see's a tractor, and some other assorted large vehicles, he yells out tractor and gets very excited.  It's incredibly adorable, but I will admit to a bit of a bias, as his doting aunt.)

He got these tractor cookies, too.  I'm told they were a lot of work...  I know from experience that they were quite tasty.

Sunday, of course, was the superbowl.  Given that I'm not a sports fan, you'd think that I wouldn't give a flying fig.  But, I did have a party to go to where I could tune out the game and tune back in for the commercials.  The hostess's birthday was on the 1st, so I wanted to bring her a cake as a surprise.  She consulted me about what to buy or make beforehand, and I had to spoil the surprise to stop her from making the cupcakes she had planned.

I had stumbled upon this photo and recipe for a zebra cake a few weeks ago and had been itching to try it out.  I thought the superbowl party was the perfect opportunity to use my friends as test subjects, um, I mean, beneficiaries of my baking talents... The original recipe I had found called for olive oil and Sprite, and I was not too sure about that combination in a cake, so kept looking.  I settled on this one instead, since the ingredients looked more normal to me.

I ended up having to borrow a round cake pan.  I don't know how I can have at more than 4 different bundt pans and not have a single normal round pan...

I don't know that I've ever actually baked a cake from scratch before, being such a fan of the modified cake mix methods of The Cake Mix Doctor.  I was tempted to just use a white cake mix and a chocolate cake mix*, and pour the batter in the pan per the zebra cake instructions, but that would have resulted in way too much cake.  (Yes, I also realize that I could have used a single box of white cake mix, and added cocoa powder to part of that mix...hindsight and all that...)  I also thought that baking the cake from scratch went hand in hand with my resolve to eat fewer processed foods.

Anyway, after getting home from my nephew's birthday party on Saturday night, I made a quick trip to the grocery store and got to baking.  

Per the recipe, I started out by mixing the eggs and the sugar together until most of the sugar was dissolved.  Then the oil, milk and flavor extracts were stirred in, followed with the dry ingredients (except for the cocoa powder).   Very soon I had 2 bowls of batter ready for pouring.

In order to achieve the stripes on the inside of the cake, you need to pour alternate between pouring small amounts of each batter into the center of the pan.  This will create concentric circles of batter.  It looks pretty snazzy in the pan, if I do say so myself, even though I think I should have poured a bit more batter per circle.


My circles were decidedly off-center, but there wasn't really anything I could do about it.  It still looked sort of impressive, though not quite like the photos in the links to the recipe.  This cake rose a crazy amount over the top of the pan, mounding in the center, and it developed a gaping crack at the top.  I will admit that I improvised with the borrowed pan - it was only an 8" and not a 9" as called for.  I am blaming that for the huge crack and the fact that I had to bake it an additional 20 minutes before it was done.  (I may have also mixed too much air into it trying to get rid of the flour lumps.)

After baking, my apartment smelled wonderful, and I was full of pride about my scratch-baked cake...until we cut into it at the party.  Luckily, we didn't make it a giant deal with candles or singing.  Lucky for me, if not the birthday girl, at least.  This cake tasted terrible.  The texture was fine and it was moist enough, but it had no flavor.  None.  Okay, maybe a little bit, since it actually tasted like cornbread to me.  I might have enjoyed it with a generous smear of butter and a bowl of chili, but cake this was not!  I knew it wasn't going to be an overly sweet cake, based on the description on the recipe site, but that site also stated that it had a good mix of vanilla and chocolate flavor.  People had commented on that site saying how perfect the recipe was and that they even used the plain batter for cupcakes.  Liars!  I don't believe it!

So much for my lofty baking ambitions...  What a let-down.  Next time, I will have to enlist the help of my good friend Betty Crocker.

Why Yes, Fran, I Did Bake that Cookie!

I baked all of these, too! All cookie cutters used were gifts from my Aunt Fran!

And that was what I had planned to post about today anyway. Nice segue!

As you may know from one of my previous posts, my new obsession is the Our Best Bites blog, where I found a tutorial for that pretty glazed icing look. And of course, since I had to have something to glaze, I needed a good roll out cookie recipe. I debated using my favorite butter cookie recipe (best butter cookies ever - thank you Susan Branch!), but went ahead and gave the sugar cookie recipe from Our Best Bites a try.

I have had trouble in the past with roll out cookies...somehow, I always have issues getting the cut dough from the cutting board to the baking sheet while retaining the same shape. It may be an issue with personal patience and chilling the dough long enough. Part of the reason I used the OBB recipe was because the author emphasized that the baked cookies retain the original shape after baking. I chose to take the suggestion about rolling out the dough between two sheets of waxed paper right after the mixing step and then sticking it in the fridge to cool. That way, when you take it out to start cutting into with your cutters, you only need to peel away the waxed paper, and don't need to add extra flour to keep it from sticking to anything.

This may be the most helpful baking tip I've ever used. (I should probably tell you all that I also left the dough in the fridge overnight, since I had planned to bake the cookies the next day anyway.) After taking the flat pane of dough out of the fridge, cutting the cookie shapes out was a snap, and there was no problem getting them onto the cookie sheet intact until the dough warmed up. At that point, I simply re-rolled the remaining dough under a fresh sheet of waxed paper and stuck it back in the fridge. Since the recipe instructs you to divide the dough into 2 even balls of dough before rolling it out, I always had a chunk of chilled dough in play. No down time!

When it came to glazing, the only problems I had were totally on my part. I had attempted to thicken up some of the glaze to pipe outlines and was then going to fill them in with the colored glaze, but I didn't truly think that through, and while the finished product looks okay, it was a huge pain in my not so little tuchas. I had already thickened a portion of the glaze and tinted it black, which I was going to use to further decorate the ghosts, and was going to use it to cover all of the bats and the cats (hardest cookies to keep in one piece...they keep deciding to become bob-tails). After filling in the ghosts with the white glaze, I decided there was no way I was going through that whole process with the bats and cats, so I decided to dip the tops of the cookies, turn them around and let the excess run off. Well...since I'd already thickened the black glaze, way more of it adhered to the cookie at first dipping, only to run off and form little puddles around the cookie edges once they had been set down. (Ideally, I would have enough counter space and cookie drying racks to keep me from having to place the finished products directly on a flat surface...alas, 'twas not to be!)

Did I mention that I had mixed up the black glaze in a standard sized cereal bowl? I didn't? Well, now you know. That would have been fine, if I hadn't later decided on dipping the cookies. Those full sized bats are really too wide to get the full cookie top flat in the bowl. So...those were a mixture of dipping and spooning... (it may sound kinky, but believe me, it was not). That should explain why you don't see any of the full sized glazed bats in my little photo montage.

After all of that, I was determined that the rest of the cookies (all pumpkins and owls, aside from one neglected mini-bat) were simply destined to be orange. That being said, I squeezed out some yellow and red food coloring gel (non-diluting, so they say) into the remainder of the non-thickened glaze. I could not, for the life of me, get a true orange color. I ended up with that 70's throw-back baby shower salmon-y pink color that you see in the photos above. When I added additional red, it only became more garish. When I added more yellow, the garish was gone, but it was back to that funky pinkish color.

Oh well, horrible color aside, dipping the cookies in the funky colored glaze worked out the best. Imagine that! I just had to let all of the excess drip off of the cookies before laying them back down. Now that I've figured out (by pure trial and error) how to glaze the cookies right, I think I may need to try the whole process again. And if I do, I'd better do it before Kristin's party this weekend, because I really cannot afford to have these cookies hanging around my house. It only leads to the same cookies hanging around my hips!

For that reason, I brought some into work today to share. I did get some nice compliments, one of which was an accusation that they were from a bakery. I love it!

Inspiration?

My good friend Kristin is having a Halloween party in a few weeks and I've been looking at ideas for things to bring along. The party is really for the kids (her 2 year old, and bunch of others), so we're not doing anything that might scare the little ones. I'm fine with that, because I'm not too into all of those foods that look like brains and severed body parts.

I have found a lot of great recipe ideas out there on the internet, including this recipe for Spooky Banana-Fudge Cupcakes. Boy do those look good! I also found this site, thanks to Kristin, which I have a feeling I'll be visiting often. The cookie pops intrigued me, because I've always wanted to be able to decorate cookies this way. So, on the same site, I found a tutorial for glazing and also for sugar cookies. Both tutorials have some great tips and now I'm eager to give both techniques a try.

With that in mind, I decided to go through my baking/candy-making drawer (yes, I have a designated drawer for this) to see what I might have on hand for Halloween projects. Mainly, I was looking for my star shaped and moon shaped cookie cutters, which I knew were somewhere in the drawer. Other than that, I really didn't think I had much in the way of Halloween-related items, so I was really surprised to find all of this:

Ignore that Christmas tin in the center...

What you are looking at is a whole slew of candy molds (those jack-o-lantern candy pop molds have a copyright date on them of 1977!) cookie cutters, treat bags and craft sticks. And no, the pumpkin was not in the drawer. That circle tin up there next to the Christmas tin (which I meant to remove before taking the photo - oops!) holds all of these:
I don't think I've ever even used any of these! So, maybe I need to whip up a batch of mini butter cookies, decorate them beautifully (I have high hopes in my limited decorating talent) and use them to top those banana-fudge cupcakes.

Of course, it's more likely that I'll whip up the cupcakes and never get to the cookies, or vice versa... But, I just might be able to do both! I have a few more weeks to plan.