Experiments in Baking

This was originally posted on my other blog, What If. I’m moving it – and all of my baking posts – here in the next few weeks.

I confess: this isn’t so experimental. It is in the sense that the delicate chemical interactions of baking always require some care, and that I see my baking as edible chemistry experiments. But ManPants is thoroughly addicted to these and so requests them every chance he gets. He doesn’t even have to speak; he has a look that says, “pumpkin muffins, please.”

I’m surprised I don’t have the recipe memorized yet. But I do have some shortcuts.

Shortcut Pumpkin Muffins

• 1 1/3 cups of whole wheat flour
• 2/3 cups of white flour
• 2/3 cups of brown sugar (firmly packed)
• 1/3 cup of regular white sugar
• 1 tblspn of baking powder
• 1 tspn of salt
• a couple of generous shakes of ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tspn of baking soda
• a couple of shakes of ground ginger

• 1/2 cup of melted butter or softened margarine
• 1/2 cup of pumpkin (organic tastes the best)
• 1/3 cup of buttermilk or (if you don’t want a whole container of buttermilk that you might never use sitting in the fridge) 1 tspn vinegar mixed with enough milk to make 1/3 cup altogether
• 1/2 cup of egg substitute

• extra brown sugar (1/4 to 1/2 cup)

Preheat oven to 400F. Mix dry ingredients together with a whisk; don’t worry if there are small chunks of brown sugar – which will either be assimilated by subsequent blending or burst inside the muffins while cooking for some sugary surprises – but break up the big ones. In a separate bowl, mix wet ingredients with the whisk.

One of the hardest things about baking is measuring lumpy, non-conformist ingredients like margarine or butter and pumpkin. My shortcut is displacement with other ingredients: pour the egg substitute into an at-least-2-cup measuring cup; spoon margarine into it until the egg plus the margarine reach 1 cup; spoon pumpkin in (pushing it down a little as you go) until all three reach 1 1/2 cups. I also skip measuring the vinegar for the imitation buttermilk. (Remember that it’s easier to add more later than it is to take it away.)

Combine the dry and wet ingredients, folding from the bottom with a sturdy spoon only until all the dry is gone. With recipes like these, where the fluffiness comes largely from the chemical reactions of the baking soda and baking powder, mixing too much or too hard can ruin the rising action. (I purposely undermixed today, just pushing on the last bits of dry with the already-mixed on the spoon, and even ManPants noticed they were fluffier than normal.) Fill muffin cups about 2/3 of the way with the mixture (leave room for rising) and sprinkle the tops with a little bit of brown sugar. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Let any PersonPants you have in your house eat a pinch of brown sugar to wet their appetite, but only if they help with the dishes. The muffins are done when a fork poked straight down the middle comes out clean. Let cool a little before eating… if you can.

modified from Land O Lakes Recipe Collection, issue #64