Muffin Win!

I really needed something to go right today.

Today was one of those crappy days. I didn't sleep well last night, we started double iterated integrals in calculus class and the prof warned we're going to speed through it toward the final, the grocery store told me they wouldn't exchange the buttermilk I accidentally bought for the real milk I really wanted (some stupid rule about not exchanging perishables after they leave the store.... um, I didn't notice when I grabbed it, how the hell am I supposed to notice before I get home??), it's quarterly report time at work, the line up at the post office was ridiculous and then the clerk took like 10 minutes and three phone calls to find the right form (yes, Recipe Guy, I mailed your headphones back to you), I forgot to get eggs on the way home and had to go back out for them, and then the applesauce I'd been planning on turning into muffins had turned into mold.

If I had railroad-train pajamas, someone would probably make me wear them.

Gah!

It was 8 pm and I hadn't even had dinner, nevermind finish the assignment that's due in my mechanical engineering class tomorrow.

And so, I decided to wing it.

Again.

I have now decided that March is wing it month. No clue what I'm going to make next week, but I'm sure as hell not going to have a recipe handy when I start.

So, with no applesauce, and utter determination to make muffins, I came up with these:

Oatmeal Date Muffins

What you need:

• 1 c quick oats
• 1 c flour
• 2 tbsp ground flax seed
• ½ c sugar
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp cardamom
• 1 c chopped dates
• ½ c butter, melted
• 1 c plain yogurt
• 1 c pear juice (or apple, or orange, or even milk)
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 1 large egg

What you gotta do:

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Holy crap I remembered. Win! This is looking good already.

Put all the dry ingredients (oats, flour, flax seed, sugar, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, and cardamom) into a big bowl,

And mix them together.

In another bowl stir together the yogurt, egg,

vanilla (crap, there’s no vanilla in the ingredients pic), and butter.

Now, I wasn’t sure I’d need the juice, but once I had the wet ingredients all together I figured the mixture wasn't “liquidy” enough. It seemed too... gloopy.

So I decided to add ½ c of pear juice.

That helped. More liquidy.

Now the dates. They’re so sweet that sugar has started to form on their surfaces.

These things are sticky and sweet. If they were hot, you'd have Def Leppard in your head now wouldn't you?

They’re also really soft and easy to chop up. And if you use the same butter knife that you used to cut up the butter, and to level the flour in the measuring cup, you only have to dirty one knife. What? I had to use an extra bowl, I’m going to conserve any way I can.

Pitted dates. Yup, pitted. See the pit? Bastards.

Once you’ve mashed/chopped a packed cup of dates… hm. Add to dry or wet? I opted for wet. But the wet bowl was a little on the small side, and it was tough to bust up the packed cup…

So I just dumped it all into the dry ingredients and started stirring.

About half way through, I realized I didn’t have enough liquid. This is where I added the other ½ c of pear juice. This is a dangerous thing to do. (not easy to photograph either)

I've had to add liquid at the end of a muffin recipe before and what came out of the oven was more like a hockey puck than it was a muffin.

When you make them, put all the juice into the wet bowl.

Mix the wet into the dry just enough to get it all combined. The dates seemed to break up nicely as I stirred. The reaction between the baking soda and yogurt had already started and the batter was nice and fluffy.

Divide the mixture into 12 muffin cups.

Bake for 20 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean. If you don’t have toothpicks, and I never do, spaghetti works just as well.

Let them cool in the tin for a few minutes before taking them out to finish cooling on the rack.

I was a little worried about how these would come out since I had to add that emergency ½ cup of juice at the end, but OMG muffin win. These things are soft, dark, moist. Just barely sweet, and with nice chunks of dates.

And since Taneasha's always piling muffins up into little pyramids, I thought I'd try too...

So, what went right for you today?

Variations on a Theme

So, we’re getting close to the end of the semester; midterms are done. I’m really looking forward to the end of this year. I’ve had just about enough of school already and being done this year means I’ve only got (hopefully) two more to go.

It also means that the guys at work are going to get their weekly dose of cookies.

The new cubes we have at work (yes, I’m in a cube; I can’t wait until summer when I can work on site again – I much prefer a construction trailer to a spot in a cube farm) each have their own whiteboards, and mine of course has a “Cookie Requests” spot. The estimators have been hounding me for peanut butter, and the accountants have been begging for creamsicle cookies.

I don’t know what it is about peanut butter cookies, but people seem to want them more than other kind of cookie. Whenever I ask for suggestions on what to make, I’m bound to have at least 2 people tell me “peanut butter.”

I don’t like peanut butter cookies. At all. Never have, never will. I conceded last summer and made a peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookie for them (I’m not fond of oatmeal either and thought I’d kill two birds with one stone), and while they were well received, I was getting requests for more peanut butter the next week! These people are insatiable.

So, I know I’m just going to keep getting hassled by these peabutt nutters, and I’m hoping I can hold them off for a while with a variation.

Almond Butter Cookies

What you need:

• ¾ c butter
• ¾ c almond butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla/almond extract/amaretto liqueur
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 ¾ c flour
• ¾ c dried cherries

Oh yeah, the sliced almonds... I didn't bother using them. You can try adding them if you'd like.

What you gotta do:

WARNING: I'm totally winging it here and taking you along for the ride as I make up a new cookie recipe.

So, I had about ¾ of a cup of butter and didn’t want to bother actually measuring half a cup (the usual amount I use for cookies) so I just dumped it all into the bowl. I’d been thinking I’d use a full cup of almond butter, but as I was pouring it into the measuring cup I realized that 1 cup would probably be too much.

Plus, I like recipes where all of the ingredients have similar or proportional measurements. It’s a bit of an OCD thing for me, but I don’t mind because I find that it usually simplifies recipes nicely. (Go look, you’ll see, I rarely mix halves and thirds)

Once the butters are combined, add the eggs

and then the extract. I’ve been soaking dried cherries in amaretto liqueur for a while now,

and used some of the cherry tinted liqueur.

Since I was totally winging this, and not entirely sure how much flour I’d need, I added it half a cup at a time, starting with a full cup. And sprinkled the baking powder on top of the flour, rather than sifting them together. I know sifting is considered very important by some people, but I rarely bother and things usually work out just fine.

Okay, so, one cup is not enough.

One and a half, not quite either.

I was really hoping to make a drop cookie, with a dough as soft as something like a chocolate chip cookie… um, I have no recipe that I can link back to! WTF. How did we make it through an entire year without making brownies or chocolate chip cookies?? ah ha! Taneasha kinda did chocolate chip... still, I think we're going to have to do a chips only post.

Anyway, drop cookie. That’s what I was going for. But that last half a cup…

Really should have been only a quarter cup.

Huh. That means that rather than 2 cups of flour, I need 1 ¾. Awesome.

So, I chopped up the ¾ c dried cherries and stirred them in.

But since I used 2 cups, I had a firmer dough that didn’t “drop” well onto the cookie sheet. I really didn’t want to go with the shaped ball pressed down with a crisscross of forks, so I just “dropped” the balls onto the sheet.

Yeah, totally dropped the ball on this one. They didn’t spread at all. And 12 minutes at 375 was too long.

Yes, 375 degrees. Preheat your oven now.

So, the next set, I rolled into balls and then flattened a bit with my hand, and baked them for only 10 minutes.

Better.

By the end of the dough, I’d given in and was rolling and flattening the cookies into symmetrical discs before baking them.

So much for drop cookies.

Also, after tasting a few, I realized that it’s not just peanut butter cookies I don’t like. It must be something about the nut butter… it just doesn’t make sense. I like peanut butter on toast. I like using it in hoisin sauce. I even like almond butter on toast and in amarettis, which are a cookie… but they’re more of a meringue/macaroon than they are a cookie…

Sigh. I’m so weird.

Oh well, at least the guys at work liked them.

 What kind of cookie don't you like?