Baking adventures

So, lately I have been trying to bake things. I´m usually more for regular cooking: I rarely cook anything in ovens (other than my famous Santa Fe Burrito Bake) with the exception of baked potatoes, the occasonal fish or pizza and very rarely a stew.

Admire my great skills with puff pastry. (or not)

It has meat in it! And cheese! And peppers! What more could anyone possibly want?









I like salty things over sweet things, generally speaking. It´s one of the reasons why I´ve never been particularly interested in baking. besides, I already have one friend whose cosmic duty is to provide me with brownies and muffins; why would I want to go through the effort of making ones myself? Simple: I was bored, and made the mistake of looking though this book:

<-- It´s 10 cookbooks in 1! You could smash someone´s toe into a pulp with it. Don´t drop it!

They have one whole "cookbook" dedicated solely to muffins. Guess what? Not all muffins have to be sweet. See where I´m going? After drooling over the peperoni muffins, the three-pepper muffins, the herbed muffins, the bacon (BACON!!!) muffins.....I finally decided that I needed to do something. Fast. So, I made: 

Sausage Muffins of DOOM!!

Though tecnically, they´re called sausage cornbread muffins (I think my name suits them best though). I gorged on them. So did my Dad. They disappeared in two sittings. I can just imagine how delicious these would taste, as a side to an "american breakfast": orange juice, hash browns, pancakes and bacon (lots of bacon!). Must make more in the future. It was a nice baking experiment, and the first time I baked muffins.


Unfortunately, not everyone in my family was overjoyed at the thought of the sheer deliciousness of a muffin combined with that drooliciousness characteristic of sausages/hot dogs. My Mom and my brother both have sweet tooths a mile wide. So, for them I made:

Behold: Brownie muffins!

They´re really chocolate muffins with chopped almonds added in, but let me have my happy moment by combining two great ideas: brownies and muffins. Yum. They were very good too (if the speed at which my brother and mother proceeded to scarf them down was any indication). Second cooking experiment: A-OK, pass with flying colors!!

Unfortunately, yesterday I tried to bake some muffins as a gift for my aunt. My parents are visiting her and my cousins, and they (naturally) heard about my Mad Muffin Skillz. They wanted muffins, and they wanted them NOW! Or, well, THEN! So I set up everything, did exactly the same things as before---and to my horror, found the gorgeous beautiful muffins acting like dying souffles once I took them out of the oven. Deeeeeeeflate! How horrible, my poor muffin babies. Figures that the at-home muffins would look great, but the guest-family muffins would look like.....you can imagine what they looked like.

CRATER MUFFINS!

My brother had a great idea, though--the crater that was left in the center of each muffin was just perfect....for vanilla ice-cream! So we ended up eating something like this:

The flavor was every bit as good as the regular muffins, and the icecream was a great idea. Sometimes I think that my brother might be a genius. Then he goes and does something stupid, and I change my mind.


In the end we determined that the cause for my choco-soufflé panic was no other than....the baking powder. Darnit, we switched brands from one baatch to the other, and the powder in the second batch was much stronger and caused the muffins to rise excessively. Oh well. Lesson learned.

New recipe: Chocolate-almond muffin craters, for use with vanilla icecream.