An Experiment....

Firstively, let me start by saying I know I didn't blog yesterday and yet my blog mandate clearly states that I will blog every day with a new recipe. Well, I'm changing it. I'll blog whenever I bake. That's usually at least once a day; sometimes twice, and sometimes every other day. The bottom line is this: If I only post when I bake there will be more creative and rich posts filled with pictures, stories about how I burn myself, slice fingertips off, and all that other fun stuff. Deal?

That said....

I'm attempting to post while baking this morning. It's a new recipe I'm creating on the fly for orange chocolate chip muffins. I've always felt that once you introduce chocolate into a muffin, it becomes more of a cupcake, but hey.... breakfast is breakfast!

Orange Chocolate Chip Muffins

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup white sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• pinch of nutmeg
• pinch of cinnamon
• 1 cup melted butter
• 2 Lg eggs
• zest and juice from 2 Lg oranges
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Method:

1. combine dry ingredients and mix well, but don't sift
2. combine wet ingredient and mix well
3. combine the dry, wet, and chocolate chips, folding just until incorporated
4. portion into lined muffin tins
5. bake @ 350° F until done (about 25 - 30 minutes)

How it all went down:

The kitchen smells like burnt orange now, but I'll get to that a little later....

Depending on the size of recipe, I usually use a fork or whisk to uniformly blend dry ingredients together. Not necessarily what the tool was designed for, but it works well.

Even though it costs a little more, I always try to use free range and/or organic eggs in my recipes. Once incorporated into baked goods, I don't think there's a real difference in taste but it still makes a difference ethically. The eggs I'm using today however are neither free range or organic, but do have a higher level of omega 3 fatty acids due to the diet of the chicken. It's my first time using these eggs and I'm not sure how I feel about it. If the recipe flops, I'll be sure to look in their direction first.

I got a micro-plane for Christmas. Aside from my french knife, it's probably one of the most used pieces of equipment in my portable kitchen. It's pretty grate. :-)


It already smells good.


For muffins with berries or chocolate chips in them, I often mix the dry and wet part way, then add the fruit or chocolate, and then complete the combining process. This way everything gets mixed evenly without creating those evil gluten strands. (Evil to muffins, anyway)

Into the oven to bake for 30 minutes and.... the tops collapsed. :-(


I think I portioned to much into each muffin cup and they couldn't hold their own structure. Some of the edge muffins even spilled over the side creating the lovely burnt orange smell I mentioned earlier.

The most important thing, of course, is the taste.... which in this case is phenomenal. I'll surely make these again, but also fully intend to mess around with the amounts of leavening agents, portion size, and oven temperature. I like my muffin to have a nice crested top, not some crazy plateau. In the meantime if anybody in blog-land decides to try fixing this recipe or has other ideas, feel free to suggest something.

I should be sleeping, but....

I bring another recipe to you today from the Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book. I have to work at 4:30 AM tomorrow and really, it would have made more sense for me to be sleeping than to be playing around with muffin recipes but this is just the kind of guy I am. I had two cans of Pepsi Max before supper keeping me alert physically, and the drive to not dissapoint my four readers (Wife, Mom, Jessica, and Carmi) keeping me on my toes mentally. So, without further ado....

Click image to make larger!

I made several adjustments to this recipe before even attempting it as written Instead of shortening, I used butter simply because butter tastes awesome - especially when paired with things like oatmeal, brown sugar, and cinnamon. And speaking of spices, another adaptation I made to the recipe was the addition of several pinches of nutmeg.

I have a German heritage after all!

I added my blueberries directly to my dry ingredients, so that when I stirred in the wet stuff it would incorporate just as fast. The recipes says to fold them in, but my method reduces the risk of over-mixing and gluten development. Nobody likes a glutenous muffin. Well, maybe the weirdos.


I baked them 50 degrees cooler and had to spin my pan around halfway through the baking time to ensure even baking because my home oven is difficult like that. They looked and smelled wonderful though!

Where the recipe suggests to remove from tins and serve warm; this would work well if using parchment liners. If, however, you're like me and don't have such clever devices on hand and instead trust on a lightly greased tin for muffin removal, I would suggest letting these muffins cool for 10 or fifteen minutes in the pan before removing. The mess you see below is the result of removing a hot muffin.

It is a very delicious mess, mind you.

Lemon Blackberry Muffins

I actually made these muffins three days ago, making up the recipe on the fly as I oft do for these sorts of things. That said, they were really, really yummy.

Really though, I'm just posting this recipe now for the purpose of squeezing in some more info about this blog... recent changes, updates to mandate, and so on and so forth.

Firstively, every post henceforth shall contain a recipe of some sort. Eventually I'll get around to indexing all these recipes in some sort of searchable database. Now, won't that be nice?

Secondively, my first post on this blog makes little to no sense now, as I've changed the title of the blog from "flour" (what was I thinking?) to "Anyone can Bake", which is sort of a play on Guesteau's book "Anyone can Cook" from the movie Ratatouille; A movie I'm guaranteed to watch at least 4 times a week due to my two year old's affection for the film. In all honesty, despite it being Disney I have affection for the movie too.

Thirdively, here's that muffin recipe I spoke of earlier:

Canadian Mark's Lemon Blackberry Muffins

Ingredients:

• 2 cups cake flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• ½ cup all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup melted butter
• 4 free run eggs
• ½ cup fresh lemon juice
• 2 tsp fresh lemon zest
• 1 pint blackberries
  

Method:
Standard muffin method.

1. blend dry ingredients together
2. mix wet ingredients together
3. combine wet with dry, add blackberries, and mix until just incorporated
4. fill lined or greased muffin cups level with top
5. bake immediately @ 350° F until done (about 20 - 25 minutes)

This should make about 12 medium sized muffins, or one 8 inch round coffee cake.