De Baking Psychopath

This is where part of the other half of the can of pumpkin I used for the pies went. This is muffin number three from the weekend of muffin baking awhile back. For most of my life, I've eaten and baked my mother's version of pumpkin bread, which has been much modified to suit our family's tastes--less sugar, pine nuts instead of walnuts, no raisins, etc. It's a delicious recipe that reminds me of my childhood, but I haven't tried any other pumpkin bread/muffin recipe in recent memory so I lack a frame of reference to compare it to other recipes. So when I decided I needed to make pumpkin muffins as part of the evacuation plan for the leftover pumpkin puree, I looked around for a new recipe and found this promising recipe in Baking: From my home to yours , which is full of tasty-looking muffin recipes. This recipe tries to recreate the pumpkin muffins sold by Sarabeth's Kitchen, a famed specialty bakery and restaurant chain in NYC. While I've never had...

This is the second of three muffin recipes I made last week (yes, three). I like having muffins in the freezer at work to eat for random hunger attacks. Beats eating a candy bar. This recipe comes from Nigella, who is one of my culinary heroines, and true to her other recipes that I've tried so far, these are easy, yummy, and flavorful. The pears can get quite molten hot, so if you decide to eat these warm, be just a tad careful. The sweet fruit and warm ginger flavor go very well together, and the muffins turned out moist and tender. Pear and Ginger Muffins (adapted from Nigella Express ) Ingredients : 1 & 3/4 cups flour (I used 1 cup AP flour, 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour) 3/4 cups granulated sugar 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon ground ginger 2/3 cup sour cream 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 tablespoon honey 2 eggs 1 & 1/2 cups peeled and chopped pears (about 1/4 inch dice; I used canned pears) Instructions : Preheat oven to 400 d...

I recently made a batch of brownies and baked them up in the square muffin pans to see how they'd turn out. The pans were marketed as a brownie and bar cookie pan, and you can see the appeal that this would have for brownie crust-lovers. Each piece with four sides of crust!! How did they turn out? Okay. The brownies tasted good and were nicely set without being overdone. The crust on each edge was present but not very substantial...I am not sure whether this had to do with not enough cooking time (i.e. if I had filled each cup a little more and required a longer period of baking in order to get the center set, would the edges have built up more by then?) or the particular qualities of the box mix brownies I was trying to use up and used for this test. In any case, I ended up with 12 perfectly portioned brownies, no cutting necessary! And they came out of the pan fairly easily (with a little help from a bit of parchment paper at the bottom of each cup). So for the reason alon...

...allow me to introduce: chocolate square cupcakes! For whatever reason, this year I've been doing a lot of birthday related activities for myself. I don't know if it's because my mother's been reminding me for months that my birthday is coming up, or if this is a special birthday to me because the age I am turning is my childhood favorite number...but from an objective standpoint, I'm not sure why I am anticipating my birthday more this year than in the last two years where I've had my zodiac year as well as significant-fraction-of-a-century birthdays. But in any case, I've already made birthday cupcakes for a joint birthday lunch at lab, almost two weeks before my actual birthday, and I'm making grandiose plans to make a fancy celebration cake from my recently-acquired copy of Baking: From my home to yours for my upcoming birthday party. For the birthday cupcakes, I called up my fancy-cake-making little sister and asked her what she'd recommen...

Square. Muffin. Pans. Pure genius. Sooooo cute. I'm infatuated. Maybe even in love. First seen here . Obsessed over for a couple of weeks, and then bought here . Bonus points: the pan I bought was marketed to be more of a bar cookie pan, so it's supposed to be amazing for brownies and mini-tarts too--brownie crust lovers rejoice!! But brownies will have to wait until next time. Instead, the inaugural recipe for my brand-spankin'-new square bar/muffin/cupcake pan was these Corn, Bacon, and Thyme Muffins. We had great plans for acquiring a bucket of Popeye's fried chicken for dinner tonight, and instead of getting biscuits, I thought I'd try my hand at corn muffins since we'd recently finally went out and bought a bag of cornmeal. Years of eating Boston Market as a kid (and I still *heart* Boston Market) has conditioned me to associate corn bread/muffins with chicken. Especially since my muffins are rectangular just like the BM ones (geometry flashback: squar...