Baking Disasters

Just a few days after I proudly wrote a post about my baking adventures and how skilled and adept I was getting at baking, I had the ultimate baking failure on Thursday night. At work there is a food club and every week two people in the club bring in treats for everyone else. The schedule rotates every Friday and we all take turns bringing treats in. We usually gather in the mornings or afternoons, depending on the treats, and we usually spend about half an hour to an hour just eating and visiting with one another.

This week was my week to bring in treats and my partner and I decided to bring in breakfast treats. I had planned to "wow" everyone with my banana chocolate chip muffins, and he was going to bring in coffee, orange juice, and a fruit salad. I bought a large bunch of bananas the week before, and I hoped that the bananas would be ripe enough by the end of the week to make the muffins. Whenever you make banana muffins or banana bread, the bananas need to be really ripe. Actually they need to be beyond ripe and it's best when the skin is already completely black. The extra-ripe bananas make the bread or muffins taste better for whatever reason. Usually when I buy bananas just for eating, they are usually over-ripe by the end of the week. But for whatever reason, the bunch of bananas that I bought were still very yellow and under-ripe by the end of the middle of the week. The bananas at that stage, would have been great in cereal or just for a snack, but they weren't at the right stage for baking.

I read online that if you want your bananas to ripen faster, you can put them in a brown paper bag with an apple. When you close the paper bag, the apple gives off a gas that makes the bananas ripen faster. So on Wednesday I tried that trick and absolutely nothing happened. The bananas weren't any more ripe than when I put them in the bag.

So, because my bananas weren't ready for baking, I had to come up with a new plan. I decided that I could make blueberry muffins instead. I have never made blueberry muffins before, but I found a recipe that looked easy and you could use frozen blueberries instead of fresh ones. I went shopping on Thursday after work to buy the ingredients I needed. I decided to buy extra ingredients, just in case I screwed up and needed to make an extra batch. I guess I had a psychic moment.

Because there are 24 people in our food club, I had to make at least three batches of muffins. When I made the first batch, I thought I made everything according to the directions. The recipe said that the batter would be a bit lumpy, and my batter didn't seem lumpy at all. The batter was a bit on the watery side, but how would I know what it was supposed to really look and feel like when I haven't made it before. I put it in the oven and when I kept checking on them, they didn't look so great. They looked dark brown (not golden brown) and they didn't rise and puff up like they should have (they looked like hockey pucks). Even though this was my first time making them with a new recipe, I had a feeling that something was wrong.

I pulled them out when they were ready and set them aside and started to make the second batch. As I made the new batch, the batter immediately felt different. The batter was much thicker, a bit doughier, and, yes, lumpy. It was at that moment when I realized that I might have totally screwed up the first batch. I put the second batch of muffins in the oven and when I checked on them, they looked like real muffins. They were light, golden brown, and they were puffed up and had the rounded tops that muffins are supposed to have.

So, what happened? What happened is that I'm a giant moron and screwed up the measurements of the first batch. The recipe calls for 2 cups of flour, and even though I do have a 1 cup measuring scoop, it wouldn't fit in the flour bag. So, instead, I used my 1/2 measuring cup and told myself that I would just double the scoops I needed. Well apparently I can't count or I just lost count, because I added only half the amount of flour that I needed. In my defense, however, I was also trying to double the recipe for the first batch, so I needed a total of 8 scoops of flour. Apparently I have a difficult time counting to 8.

In spite of feeling like a giant moron and failure for a few hours, the next batches of muffins I made turned out OK. They tasted good to me, and when I took them to work my co-workers seemed to like them. Maybe they were just being nice, but at least no one choked on them or spit them out. So maybe with a little more practice, I will soon be able to perfect blueberry muffins.