Seventeen minutes and 38 seconds until I know the results of my experiment in baking. Outside the snow sits adorning a brownish landscape with a bleak grey sky watching from above. The kitchen is a mess, something I’ll have to clean up later, and what I believe to be a correctly mixed recipe of apple cinnamon muffins is slowly baking in the oven.
Why would I drag you into my kitchen and write about it? Well, first it’s to show you all that men too can bake and also to demonstrate that photo opportunities are everywhere, not just in exotic locations.
What’s all involved in baking muffins from scratch? Not all that much really; look up a recipe, gather ingredients, mix, stick in oven and wait. I had a slight hitch in the ‘gather ingredients’ phase and had to run out for some flour and cinnamon, not a fun thing to do in almost freezing temperatures before breakfast.
What’s involved in taking pictures of the event? Even less; a bit of courage to show your kitchen, understanding that dramatic points of view result in dramatic pictures, and of course a camera.
Chopping apples, hanging on doggedly to the mixer as it blended, spooning brownish glop into a muffin pan, it only took about 20 minutes. I even got to use math skills I had learned back in grade school, or was it high school.
Confronted with a recipe that called for ¾ a cup of sugar I looked at my tools only to realize that there was no ¾ cup anywhere. A light bulb went off in my head as I saw that there was a ½ cup and a ¼ cup right in front of me. One-half is 2/4, and 2/4 + ¼ = ¾, voila. Word doesn’t even recognize 2/4 as a fraction…funny.
Looking up from writing I just realized there is a decent amount of smoke hanging about the ceiling; time for me to open a door to air the room out. Three more minutes until I know what happened.
The before looked pretty good, a bit messy, but like something you would want to eat once it was properly baked.
Cough. Time to open up another door.
Less then a minute and I am getting a little apprehensive. It might be the smoke, it might be that this is my first time baking muffins, it might be that all the ingredients didn’t quite fit in those cute little cups…
And then the final result, before tasting of course, the sugar is still cooling on the muffin caps.
Look for what people think of these muffins later on the Facebook page.
And as a side note, barely any photo editing was done to these pictures, mainly color adjustment and a little bit of sharpening.
Got questions? Feel free to ask.
