Food Porn VI

“Oh, Muffin!”

Wow. That was close. If not for my lovely assistant, these applesauce-spice muffins would have been a complete disaster.

For the latest in my GF treat basket, I decided to make this easy-peasy recipe and, as usual, prepped the ingredients before I started mixing. The cup measure won’t fit in the flour jar, so I did the math and determined that 10 x .25 scoops would give me the requisite 2.5 cups, but, boy, did that look like a lot of flour. In fact, I ran out of the GF mix and had to top up with plain brown rice. Must have been an optical illusion, i.e., if I’d used a bigger bowl, it would have looked right. So, in went the baking powder, soda, salt and spices.

On to the wet ingredients.

Butter and sugar beaten to “light and fluffy”, it was time to add the eggs. However, as the stand mixer in our kitchen is me standing with the hand mixer, I called on Ter for help. She knows the drill; she’s done this often enough: Eggs first, one at a time, then dry/milk/dry/milk/dry.

“Boy,” she said once the eggs were in, “that’s a lot of flour.”

“One cup at a time,” I suggested, dismissing her observation as I had dismissed my own.

She dispensed the first cup in three increments (the better to incorporate flour into batter without dusting up the kitchen), then poured in half the almond milk. The second cup of flour went in, also in three increments.

“Wait a sec,” I said. “Are you using the third cup measure?”

She checked. “Yup.”

We both eyed the remaining flour.

“That’s way more than half a cup,” she said.

I was doing rapid calc in my head and suddenly realized, “Crap! I measured out the flour in half cups, not quarters!”

Ter blanched. “What?”

I gave her the half-cup measure. “One of these and we’re done. I wondered why it looked like too much flour!”

“Well, yeah,” Ter agreed, all but rolling her eyes, “because it is!”

I wore that one, emerging from near-catastrophe with gratitude for my trusty kitchen elf attachment. She helped with the cleanup, too, but ahead of putting the flour back in the jar, she glanced a little nervously at me and asked, “Did you put cinnamon in the flour?”

Oh, $***. So the muffins are only half-spiced and our flour supply has cinnamon, salt and baking powder already added. No breaded chicken until further notice.

I’m renaming this recipe “Right Brain Muffins” because that’s obviously where I was when I baked ’em.