A number of weeks ago, I found a cookie dough cupcake recipe online that I wanted to try because cookie dough is the best thing in the universe, so I bought a muffin tin and made the cupcakes. (Not according the recipe, heaven forfend. I adjusted ratios slightly, and I made my own cookie dough to put in the middles and used a different frosting.) They were underwhelming, but… I still had the tin. It did not seem right to just leave my muffin tin there, to be used for only one less-than-spectacular batch of cupcakes.
So I e-mailed my mother and got a lot of recipes for muffins, and for quickbreads, which are basically the same batter as muffins but shaped differently and baked longer (so you can make the same batter and just bake it in a muffin tin instead of a loaf pan). I got a great big stack of recipes in the mail, found some more on the Internet, and set about merrily making muffins. But because I am an improvisational cook and recipes grate on me, I was also taking careful note of the distillable qualities of the muffins I made. For example, the recipes which called for butter as the sole fat content had a consistent ratio of one stick of butter to one dozen muffins. I made a chart like so (click for full image):
Obviously, there’s a fair amount of variation here, but see the recipe on the far right of the full image – apple oat? I made them up. To be fair, I was timid about it: I used the banana bran muffin recipe as a template. But since I swapped out both the banana and the bran from a recipe called “Banana Bran Muffins”, I think I retain my improvisational cred. (Note: “batch of applesauce” means I dumped in the applesauce I had in the fridge from when I made some the other day. It was 3 lbs. apples worth minus what I had for a snack right after it came off the stove. I didn’t measure it, I just eyeballed it as about the right amount. My batter wound up pretty thick, so I splashed in a little milk, which is not noted on the chart.)
And the variation between the different recipes – even the ones that I took at face value – is a great example of my claim that even baking isn’t infinitely delicate. All of these recipes produce muffins. Some of them have baking powder and no baking soda; some of them have baking soda and no baking powder; some of them have both. They have different numbers of eggs per dozen muffins. Different amounts of flour. Additionally, they all come with optional extra ingredients like chopped nuts, dried fruit, or chocolate chips; these don’t affect them substantially either.
I still need to make more muffins, from recipes or closely adapted from recipes, before I will be able to make any kind of muffin I want without looking at a piece of paper. But this is a good example of how you can graduate from strict recipe-based cooking to modular cooking by learning what recipes have to teach you, and then gradually departing from them.
If you want to try making some of these muffins, just preheat your oven to 375-400 degrees, mix up all of the ingredients (butter at room temperature unless otherwise specified) in this order: fat, sugar, eggs, wet ingredients, all dry ingredients. Unless you have a Teflon-coated muffin tin like I do, you should smear the muffin cups with butter and then sprinkle them with flour so the muffins don’t stick. Fill muffin cups most of the way full of batter. Bake. After fifteen minutes or so, or when they start to smell so good that you really really wanna open the oven, poke them with a toothpick (or, if you don’t have toothpicks, an unused twist tie from the grocery store – you can swipe those things by the dozens) and see if it’s goopy in the middle. If it is, give it another couple minutes and poke one again; repeat until they are not goopy, then remove the muffins from the oven. Let them cool until you can touch the pan without burning yourself, because it’s hard to get muffins out of a tin with oven mitts on. Ease them out of the pan carefully. Nom them. Put extras in bread bags or Rubbermaid-type containers; freeze for long-term storage or just leave them on the counter to sneak at a whim.
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