Burning muffins

I love making muffins, all kinds of muffins.  When I was a kid, it was one of the first things I learned to make as it was a simple and direct recipe with nothing fancy: add the ingredients to a bowl, mix them all up, spoon them into a muffin pan, and bake.  It was also something inexpensive to make and the ingredients were staple ingredients that were always available in the kitchen.  I remember using the basic muffin recipe out of one of the more popular cookbooks of the time.  Now when I go back to that recipe I realize how plain and unflavorful it really was.  But at the time I loved to make them and slather them with butter and jam.  I think it was the combination of the muffin texture, the creamy butter and the sweet jam which really drew me to them.  And they were so quick and easy to make.  Thirty minutes after you started to put them together, they were out of the oven, hot and ready to eat.

Of course, as time goes on, tastes change and preferences evolve.  But the basic lure of the muffin remains.  I love to make carrot muffins, pumpkin muffins, blueberry muffins, coffee cake muffins, and others, all of which will eventually find their way to the menu page of Bruce Bakery and Bristro.  Yesterday I was making lemon poppy seed muffins (perhaps the most popular of all?).  This recipe is great.  The batter is whisked (rather than mixed with a beater) which contributes to a lighter fluffier muffin.  Lots of lemon zest and freshly-squeezed lemon juice are added, and melted butter is slowly drizzled into the batter at the very last while the whisk does it's work.  Then it sits overnight in the fridge.  In the morning, you pipe it or spoon it into jumbo muffins cups and pop them into the oven. 

The oven is set at 425 initially, but as soon as they are in, the temperature is lowered to 325.  This gives them an initial blast of heat, jump starts the cooking and they expand upward, but then they slowly cook the rest of the way as the temperature gradually falls to 325.  That's the way it's supposed to work.  Well .... yesterday I made two batches of these and they came out perfect.  I prepared the third batch and popped them into the oven and then sat down to play a game of online chess while they cooked.  It was a timed game so it was guaranteed to be over before I had to pull the muffins out of the oven.  I was playing someone in Portugal.  I play almost every day and get a chance to play with others all over the world (ah, the wonders of our modern technological internet-driven age). Well, my game finished up a bit early as it didn't play out to the full time .... one of the players resigned.  I grabbed some grapes and cherry tomatoes to snack on (good healthy things to keep out on kitchen counter for idle foraging), and as I puttered around the kitchen popping them in my mouth, I began to notice an aroma that was a bit different than usual coming from the oven.  And then I realized just as the timer was going off: I forgot to lower the temperature on this last batch of muffins when they went into the oven. 

These poor bright lemony muffins had been sitting in that oven at 425 the whole time.  Opening the oven door let out a bit, not a lot, of brown smoke.  The muffins weren't black, but were they were certainly toasty brown, very brown.  I let them cool and then wondered: if I were to cut the tops off, would the bottoms be edible?  I wouldn't give them to anyone else, but I might play with the edible parts in some other kitchen concoction.  Alas! the bottoms, all the insides, looked the way they should but they all had a darker flavor imparted from the sternly cooked tops.

I should have taken a picture, but it didn't occur to me to do so at the time.  Instead I tossed them out in the back garden under one of the bird feeding stations.  I figured the squirrels wouldn't mind the overly browned tops.  I was right.  Within a couple hours they were all gone. 

The squirrels get to feast on things like that from time to time here at my home.   I'm not sure if that makes them want to hang around here more than they would otherwise, but they certainly do like to make themselves feel at home.