There Will Be Muffins

I’m kind of obsessed with making muffins. I bake muffins all the time. Healthy ones. Not healthy ones. Almost healthy ones. I’m not sure that I actually like muffins to that degree… I mean, they’re fine, but I think the reason I make them so much is probably because I always have ingredients that need to be used up (bananas or zucchini, for example), and muffins are a great way to do that, and a great way to feed people. I have a kid who won’t eat anything I pack her for lunch except muffins. I always (at minimum) double the batch and freeze some. In the last week, I’ve made banana muffins, double chocolate muffins, and poppy seed muffins, and I currently have a batch of cinnamon sugar donut muffins in the oven, which I’m making for the first time (part of my muffin making obsession is trying out new muffin recipes). 

I confess, I’m making muffins more than usual right now. I do make muffins regularly, but right now, I’m making them with greater frequency because I’m freezing them for girls camp. The Young Women wanted muffins for breakfast one of the days, and when I priced out the cost of muffins for 25 people with a portion of them needing to be gluten-free for our girls with celiac, it would have been about $27 in muffins. I thought, “Well, I’m a muffin making maniac, so it’s no big deal to make muffins for camp at a fraction of the cost!” Thus, I’ve been baking. And I made even more muffins because I needed to entice some Young Women to help me set up the tents and get them waterproofed so I bribed them with breakfast… hence the cinnamon sugar donut muffins (which I balanced with scrambled eggs - laid by my chickens) and watermelon (I had an extra watermelon left over from our summer kick-off party last week). So it was a pretty inexpensive breakfast to provide for the YW as long as you don’t count the $500 I spent on paper plates.

The thing I don’t like about making muffins, though, is when I have to get the muffins out of the tin. I’m sure somewhere on the Tik Tok there’s some great muffin hack that I could be today years old for, but me at today years old doesn’t have the energy or mind space for the Tik Tok. 

Here’s my problem… to get the muffins out of the tin, I usually flip them over and give the pan a little wiggle. Sometimes one will fall on the floor. Sometimes I have to give them a little more of a shake, and they fall out on their tops and get slightly smashed. Sometimes they fall onto the baking rack and end up with baking rack lines in the tops.

I rarely use paper liners for muffins because A) why? B) lazy and C) garbage. Cupcakes? Yes to paper liners. Muffins? Nah. I also have some silicone liners that I got from the thrift store for $.50. They actually work rather nicely (I wasn’t sure what to expect), but washing them can be annoying. Why am I telling you this? I don’t even use them for muffins!

(May I interject that when I started this post, I had no idea where I was going with it, and I didn’t know that I had so much to say about muffins?)

So know this… if you ever need muffins for a potluck or just for your fine self… I gotchu. You let me know, and there will be muffins. They might be slightly smashed and lop-sided, but I’ll throw in some chocolate chips to make up for it.