Muffin madness

Multiple copies of the LA Times were strewn across our apartment floors for a couple of weeks. Perhaps it’s not in good taste to explain why in a food post. At any rate, the food section has provided some inspiration for baking the last few weeks. I’ve not had an upside-down cake for ages; not since childhood days of being allowed to make pineapple upside-down cake unsupervised. So it was with great glee that I made a lemon upside-down cake a few weekends ago for my BBQ. It allowed me to get all sorts of things going on the grill and make a cake at the same time. Recipes should always be this easy. Unfortunately, no photos were taken. A usual. You must think I fake these posts… I was going to link to the LA Times recipe, but found it’s a pay-per-view article. Well, sod that. I’m not going to reproduce it here, because I’ve no doubt there’s some copyright law on that. So, there goes my stupid plan of using this blog as my recipe archive.

Multi-story muffin

To make up for a lazy Sunday of frozen waffles and blueberries, I got up early to make muffins on Wednesday. (If it was a lazy Sunday, does that make this a working Wednesday?) The recipe, again, was courtesy of the LA Times, so no link. It called for Meyer lemons, but we’re swimming in mandarins at the moment, so mandarins it was. I like recipes that don’t faff about too much during the prep stage. This one required the citrus to be roughly chopped, then food-processed, which wasn’t overly complicated for early morning. The rest of the muffin recipe was the usual simple stir-wet-into-dry-but-not-too-much. I don’t think I’ll use this recipe again. It called for 1/2 cup of butter, which, compared to that epicurious recipe from before, is 1/2 a cup of butter too much. (Maybe the banana in the previous recipe added enough moisture and good fat to hold the whole thing together.) But I like the idea of using my spare citrus in this manner. Perhaps I could bastardise the two recipes and come up with something edible, yet P-heart-friendly. More experimentation beckons.

Mucho muffins

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

Frozen Brekkie

Freezer brekkie

Best not ask what time I woke up today. I don’t even know that. Been living without a clock since moving in. And my last functional watch died last summer. And my mobile phone has done a strange disappearing act every weekend ever since I was phoned on the morning of my last birthday (a Sunday that time) about the location of a chemical in my lab.

Sundays have never been good days for me. I feel as if I should be doing a million and one things, but my body refuses to budge out of the nest I’ve made in my bed. On rare occasions, I get up early enough to have what is commonly known as breakfast. Sometimes I even bake something for brekkie.

Not today. Courtesy of some clever forward planning by P, we had store-bought blueberry waffles with frozen blueberries on the side. They weren’t “leggo of my eggo”, but close. There’s something about plastic, pre-fabricated waffles that appeal to me, along with equally hydrocarbon-chain-polymer-like hash browns. I prefer the “real thing”, but on some occasions, when one has woken up far closer to lunchtime than decent folk should, plastic tastes just fine.

P tucking in

Cross posted on akatsukieats.

Banana and blueberry muffins

Banana and blueberry muffins

I’m always envious of those Martha Stewart types who seem to have it all together. You know, nice home, nice garden, nice kids, good food on the table, nice table settings. And I’ve always suspected that while Martha Stewart herself has a huge operational team to make that happen for her, there really exist real women and men out there who live the life she has trademarked. Such people can get up in the morning, put the coffee on, make the bed, groom themselves, get breakfast ready, get the kids ready, yadda-yadda-ya… And that’s just within one hour in the morning.

On the best of mornings (and only weekend ones at that), I just about manage to get out of bed some time after 1000h, stumble to the shower, waste copious amounts of water to get my eyes open, and demand breakfast very loudly until P gets up and makes it. But today, for some odd and unknown reason, I made muffins. Banana and blueberry ones at that. I’ve never made muffins. Not successfully anyway. I can make the most intricate of damn sachertortes, but hand me a muffin tin and crap comes out. Figuratively. Please, what do you think I am? Cack-handed?

Recipe courtesy of Epicurious.com. Not having a Martha Stewart team of organised people to ensure all reagents were in place prior to baking, I was about 2 bananas short of a full cup and completely lacking oat bran. But I had frozen blueberries. That counts for something. Substituting oat bran with some weird New-Age seven-grain hot breakfast mix seemed to work, with the pleasant side-effect of crunchy, nutty bits without the sat fats of nuts. But substituting a shortfall of bananas with milk, vanilla and maple syrup results in an overly moist muffin lacking structure.

No matter. P liked it. While not a success, it wasn’t a complete failure.

Eww. I’ve just looked at this post on Firefox and my muffins look like crap. They looked OK on iPhoto and Safari. What’s up with that?