With a little help from my friends

Muffins with a margin of error

 

Taste & See: I am not a good baker. I am good at making sauces, I am good at making decent meals out of barely-salvageable bits found in the back of the fridge, I am good at making people feel happy and well-fed when they visit me. But a baker, I am not.

I have not learned to accept this.  I occasionally forget I am a bad baker and embark on a baking project and wind up with too-hard biscotti I nonetheless crunch through, nearly ending up with broken teeth and dental bills for my trouble. Bread billed as "hearty" becomes dense and gummy.  Cookie bottoms are burned as I forget, yet again, to set a timer.

Sure, there are some things I can bake--I've fooled people with a certain pumpkin bread dozens of times, and I've successfully pulled out regular loaves of no-knead bread since learning how earlier this winter. I can even pull my act together when it is really, really necessary and make a dynamo 3 layer chocolate cake for a friend's birthday.  

But casual, "just mix up some muffins for Saturday brunch" baking? Ugh. I am totally prone to throwing in extra flour on accident, compensated by extra liquid. Or forgetting a step. Or more likely, ignoring a step. And then my Saturday morning feast becomes a lesson in forcing myself to eat my mishap, in hopes I'll learn from my mistakes.

Why am I shooting myself down, you ask? Merely to build up the beauty of this muffin recipe borrowed from Apriosa blog, written by a friend of mine. I've made these successfully twice; that means the first time wasn't a fluke. I didn't follow the directions with any more precision than I usually do; while I used measuring cups, kinda, and more or less added all the required ingredients, I took some liberties. 

Normally my family just calls my topless muffins "tea cakes," politely pretending I wasn't aiming high. And yet, these came out beautifully, crispy crust, soft inside, nice and tall.  These muffins must have a built-in margin of error: just my kind of muffin.

It also helped that I used homemade butter. Not farmers' market butter, which is darn good (I like love am fanatical about Ronnybrook's maple butter). HOMEMADE. Like, I made it.  Like, the kind that, in grade school, came about after shaking a jar full of cream for an hour on the pre-Thanksgiving pilgrim day at school, in which we made bread, butter and jam. That was my favorite day of the year.

Only, thanks to a twitter friend, I didn't use a jar. Sure, if you want nicely toned muscles or want to don your best prairie-petticoat and capture that pre-electricity romantic feel, a jar is great. But I had muffins to make; I poured my mixture into my Kitchen aid. By the time the muffins were in the oven, the butter had separated. By the time the muffins were baked, I had butter, buttermilk, & an unrelated big mug of coffee. Not bad for a bad baker! 

Do It Yourself:

With a little help from my friends, even a bad baker can make good muffins, and the butter is just the plum-easy cherry on top. Have a good breakfast!
 
Apricosa's Soda Muffins, ala The Faux Gourmet
Makes 8

Ingredients

• 1½ cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 Tbs. sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ½ tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. cinnamon
• 2 Tbs. butter, room temperature
• 1 cup dried fruit (I like apricots; she suggests raisins)
• *1¼ cups buttermilk or substitute
• 1 egg
  

*While making homemade butter produces buttermilk that could, in theory, be used here, I didn't make mine in time and my grocery store didn't open early enough to dash over to get some. What's a girl to do? You've got a couple options, courtesy Life123 & my own experience. They may lack the "rich tang" of real buttermilk, but in a pinch they still make for baked goods of which you can be proud:

• Add Acid:
  Add approximately 1 Tbsp acid (ie, vinegar, or if you haven't got that, lemon juice) to a cup of milk.
• Yogurt:
  Use the same amount of plain yogurt that you would need of buttermilk.  This is my preferred method, though I substitute about 2 Tbsp per cup with water, because I use very thick yogurt. Do not use flavored yogurt or yogurt with fruit!
• "Half & Half":
  Mix half plain yogurt and half whole milk; you may want to add one half teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice to this mixture as well.
• Milk:
  That’s right, plain milk. Buttermilk is just the liquid that is removed in the butter making process, see below, and is actually low in fat.  To thicken the milk and make it slightly sour, add one and three fourths teaspoons of cream of tartar to an eight-ounce cup of regular milk.
  

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 400°F.  
• While oven heats, whisk first 7 ingredients in a large bowl.
• Blend butter into flour until incorporated, then stir in dried fruit and coat well with flour mixture.
• Whisk buttermilk or substitute and egg together, then add to dry ingredients and stir to blend. 
• Divide batter among 8 large muffin cups lined with muffin papers.  Apricosa suggests using an ice cream scoop; a spoon worked fine for me.  
• Bake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 23 minutes. Remove muffins from pan.

Cool slightly on rack before removing muffin paper or it will stick. Store any leftover muffins in an airtight container.  

Apricosa offers this most helpful hint:  To get leftover muffins back to fresh-baked glory, remove the muffin paper and toast the entire muffin in a toaster oven.  You'll end up with that delicious, crunchy crust again.  Enjoy!

Homemade butter
Makes approximately 1 cup buttermilk and 1 cup butter

This recipe is hardly a recipe; making butter is just a matter of shaking cream til the fats (solids) separate out from the liquid. But if you've never done it, it may be helpful to read my account of what to expect during the shaking process so you don't worry you've done something wrong when it takes awhile.

Instructions

• Mix pint of cream with 1/4 cup of live, plain yogurt and let it sit, refrigerated, at least overnight. (I left mine for two nights and it was fine). 
• Mix with a kitchenaid mixer on slow-medium using the whip attachment until the liquids and solids separate. 

It takes about 15 minutes and goes through several stages. At first it will look like nothing is happening; after 5-10 minutes it will look like whipped cream.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the liquids and fats will separate and it will look kind of gross and chunky. Keep going just a tiny bit longer, turning down the speed so as not to splatter the liquids all over your kitchen.  The butter is done when it the solids are in a few big lumps, relatively hard.

• Set a colander over a bowl and pour the solids into the colander, catching the liquids in the bowl--there's your buttermilk. 
• Rinse the butter under cold water, remove all traces of buttermilk, which makes butter go rancid. 
• Squeeze butter dry in a cheesecloth or several layers of paper towels and shape into a rectangular log or serving bowl. 

Variations:  Make like Ronnybrook and flavor your cream/yogurt mix.  I haven't yet gone down this path but I'm looking forward to doing so, dreaming about rosemary butter and brown sugar butter and ancho chile butter. Will keep you posted!