The Great Muffin Caper

So someone mentioned that I've been neglecting my own blog. In my defense, I'd like to say that nothing interesting has happened to me; I go to work, I go work out, I crochet, I watch CSI, I drink excessively on the weekends. While I could share every detail of my day, I tend to think that would be a waste of my time and yours, so I'm sticking to my "when something interesting happens to me, I'll blog" attitude. Since it's been so long, you can only imagine how routine life has been lately. Anyway, on with the story...

Whenever things get a little too dull for Jenny and me, we start looking for ways to spice things up, and everyone knows that when you start looking for spice, you usually end up with trouble. As I think about it now, we were probably due some trouble anyway, as these things are very cyclical, and it's been about a month since "The Infamous La Strada Affair," (aka "The Brunch That Almost Took Our Lives") and about two months since "The Mystery of the Leaky Ceiling" (aka "Oh No! We Signed a Year Lease On A Fucking Slum!").

In any case, last Monday evening started like any other: we both arrived home from work, and scraped ourselves some dinner together (leftover BBQ, if you must know). Jenny had brought home a stack of copy-editing, and I was prepared to kick back with a Coronita and do some crocheting when Jenny had an idea: chocolate chip muffins! She wanted to make some to take to work, and had found a recipe online. Excellent, I thought, just what we needed to make things more interesting.

It was decided that I would run to the store and grab the ingredients we didn't have as well as mini-muffin pans, since that was what Jenny wanted. I hopped in my car, and made my way across town to the closest place that I knew of that would sell mini-muffin pans at 9 at night: Target. Problem number one of the night: Target was crawling with Rice students. Since I live in eternal fear of the day I run into someone I know from Rice and they say "Hey, (insert inquisitive look here) didn't you graduate?" or even worse, "So you're taking an extra semester, right?" I did the only thing I could: I ducked behind shelves and weaved through aisles keeping my head down, got the damn muffin pans and ingredients, then got the hell out of there. I made it back home victorious, not having run into one person I knew, and still on my high from evading total strangers, I entered the apartment ready to take on those muffins. Jenny dropped her copy-editing (of which, btw, she'd done very little having gotten distracted by lord knows what), walked into the kitchen, flipped on the light and...nothing happened. That's right, our lone remaining light bulb had blown out. Well, we never let a little darkness stop us! We turned on the light in the laundry room, and the light in Jenny's room and got to work. Forty-five minutes later the mini-muffins were out of the oven, and we were all stoked to try them. I could sit here and describe the texture, the aroma, the complex combination of flavors, but I figure just telling you that they tasted like ass will suffice. Oh, and also they were dry as hell; like eating straight flour. So I got on allrecipes.com and looked at the recipe Jenny had picked out. As it turns out the recipe had a four star rating, but only after some reviewer's recommended changes were made. Here's a sample of the reviews for the original recipe:

"This recipe produces a fairly bland muffin, rich neither in texture nor taste"
- KIWANOMELON

"These muffins were so dry. I followed the recipe exactly. I will never make these again."
- DISKODIVA

And one of my personal favorites:

"If you want to please a crowd do not make these muffins. I followed the recipe exactly and these things came out horrible. My kids hated them and so did I. They were more like rocks instead of muffins."
- CANDYO383

Needless to say Jenny had NOT read the reviews before deciding to make this particular recipe. We quickly dumped the remaining batter and decided to try again with the improvements that allrecipes.com member JAKYSMOM recommended. (As a side note, how sad is it when you're forced to be known solely as someone's mom. I mean, eww.) In any case, although Jaky's mom had some good ideas, the second batch of muffins, which came out of the oven around midnight, were marginally better, but still fairly mediocre. We decided to call it a night, and began washing dishes, at which point I remembered the lights above the sink that we'd never used before because they were so frickin' bright. Lucky for us that they were, I guess, since it was almost as good as the ceiling lights once I turned them on. Feeling humiliated by the lights, and betrayed by Jaky's mom, we wearily made our way to bed with muffins still on the brain.

The next day at work, unbeknownst to each other, we both spent gratuitous amounts of time looking up other muffin recipes. I was thinking that we could just buy more ingredients, and make three or four recipes that looked promising, and decide which was best. I called Jenny on my way home to see if I should stop at the store, but receiving no answer, I went straight home. It turned out that Jenny didn't answer because SHE had gone to the grocery store, and she bought EVERYTHING she'd ever seen in any muffin recipe. Flour, sugar, sour cream, butter, milk and the list goes on. She'd also bought a box of butter flavored cake mix, and a box of muffin mix from the store. Her idea was that if you mixed every recipe you could think of together, the muffins were bound to come out well. I found this logic to be a little faulty, so I decided to branch out on my own and make a muffin recipe I'd found online from a Bed & Breakfast somewhere in New England. I figured if Grandpa Red could serve these and still have a business open, they couldn't be nearly as disgusting as the ones we'd made the night before. So the baking commenced. Jenny began dumping things into her bowl, and I followed Grandpa's recipe to a T.

Well wouldn't you know it, but Jenny's muffins tasted good, and mine were almost as bad as the original muffins. Jenny rejoiced and began mixing a new batch of muffins, and I began fiddling with Grandpa Red's recipe, adding all kinds of shit that wasn't in the original. By the time my first second batch was going in, and Jenny realized that instead of adding cake mix to her second batch of muffins, she'd added Bisquick, I was sick of muffin talk. The kitchen was covered in them: big muffins, little muffins, muffin mixes and ingredients, not to mention a slippery spot on the floor from when Jenny had sprayed cooking spray on the muffin pans. The whole thing was disastrous, and I was convinced that there was no way in hell I'd ever want to look at a muffin again. So of course fate came along, and made my modified Grandpa Red's muffins taste fucking delicious. In fact they were so good that I'm renaming them. They're my muffins so they shall henceforth be known as "Alana's Badass Chocolate Chip Muffins." Fuck that loser Grandpa Red. In any case, even Jenny's part Bisquick muffins turned out well, and both sets were taken to our respective jobs the next day.

Anyway, I'd like to share what we learned from our experience, so that if you all ever decide to bake muffins, you can avoid the same mistakes we made.

What we learned:
1) No one in the world can make a good chocolate chip muffin except Jenny and me.
2) There are weird assholes out there that sabotage everyone else's muffins because they like dry muffins. Before you accept a muffin recipe from anyone, ask if they're into dry muffins. If the person says yes, get as far from them as possible. Their recipe will be shitty.
3) If the batter tastes like ass the muffins will too.
4) Don't take your Bisquick out of the box, put the box away, and then leave the bag of Bisquick next to your cake batter. You will almost definitely pick up the wrong bag.
5) You really CAN mix any damn thing together to make muffins, and in fact, they'll probably be better than any recipe you could come up with.
6) Before you spend over $60 and two evenings making the perfect muffin, check your recipe box. Your grandmother's muffin-top recipe will probably work just fine, and in fact be better than anything you could come up with.
And finally,
7) If you are too embarrassed to admit to your co-workers that you made your muffins by mixing a regular muffin recipe with a store bought muffin mix and a powder cake batter, do not give your co-worker your grandmother's recipe that you recently re-discovered instead. Your co-worker will ask questions you can't answer such as "How many muffins will this make?" and then you will feel like a fraud as you stutter and blurt out a random number. Instead, just tell her that you used a recipe off allrecipes.com. By the time she's fought through four different recipes that all taste like flour balls, she'll be so nauseated at the idea of muffins, she'll never ask you about your recipe again.

In other news, Jenny and I are considering getting dogs. (I'm using the term "considering" loosely, btw. It's more like "thinking about occasionally when we're bored"). She wants a little Teacup Poodle named Vito, and I want a Scottish Terrier named "MacDougal." Other suggestions for names are welcome, of course.