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?

It's way easier if you get a third involved

So, it's only 3 weeks into the semester and I'm putting up a tip for my weekly post. Taneasha only thinks she wants to kill me. Next week, she'll see the wicked amazing dish I made that's taking a long time for me to get all together into one post.

For now, I thought I'd show you a little trick you might like to turn when you're separating eggs.

So, there's the yolk and the white and usually a bowl for each. But, what happens if you add a third to this happy little pair?

Part of the issue with separating eggs is that sometimes the yolk breaks. Especially when you're just starting out with baking and learning new techniques. I mean, juggling a delicate sac filled with gooey fluid between two tiny fragile cups with sharp edges? Does not sound easy. That's why sometimes it's handy to get a third party involved.

So, get yourself an egg. Gently tap it on the edge of a bowl to crack it, and then carefully pry the halves apart.

You're going to want to do this over a bowl because the white will immediately start to ooze out.

Now, gently ease the halves to the right and tip the yolk into the half shell in your right hand. More white will fall into the bowl.

Tip the other way and transfer the yolk to the left half of the shell. After doing this a couple times, you'll have all the white in the bowl and nothing left in the shells but the yolk.

Dump the yolk into the second bowl.

You just separated an egg!

But, you've got three more to go! I don't know, maybe you're making ice cream or merengues or something...

Before you grab another egg, grab another bowl.

Set your bowl of white aside and start the process again over the newly introduced third bowl.

When you've got your second egg separated, you'll have one bowl with 2 yolks, and two bowls with 1 white. Combine all the white into one bowl, whichever one you want.

Now you're back to a white bowl, a yolk bowl, and an empty bowl.

Why? Well, because if, as you were passing that delicate yolk back and forth over sharp edges, you happned to break the yolk as you were working over a bowl of egg white, you'd end up with a bowl of egg white and some yolk. That's kinda the opposite of separating eggs.

Sharp edges, see:

And it can be disastrous if you're trying to collect whites to whip into some kind of delicate and frothy delightful dessert.

By having a special third bowl to hover over while you're doing the separating, you're much less likely to end up contaminating your whites with yolk. I mean, if you're separating 5 or 6 eggs and on the last one you end up with yolk in the whites bowl... you're going to have to make a lot of bread pudding (sweet or savoury) to use all that egg.

So, 3 bowls: one for whites, one for yolks, and one to separate over. Best threesome ever.