last moon

hello, i just came back from the platoon bbq, and am waiting for the wooziness to go away; i only drank one small cup of (undiluted) bailey's!

so anyway, i made two batches of muffins for the bbq. as nigella says, nothing succeeds like excess.
when you see such a layout, you know it's going to be good. we have cranberries, eggs, buttermilk, milk, and peanut butter amongst other things. today's project was on cranberry muffins, and snickers and peanut butter muffins. (both nigella recipes.) the cranberries were supposed to be blueberries, but fresh blueberries - the only kind available at ntuc - were, when i last checked, too expensive, and so i settled with the packet of cranberries!
but today was a very klutzy day. think susan in desperate housewives. i don't even know why. first i added the melted butter to cold buttermilk and everything curdled. (in baking, we almost always work everything at room temperature.) this resulted in me having to pour everything into a saucepan to heat until melted again. and when i was going to pour the smoothed mixture back into the measuring jug, i spilled a good 25ml of the buttermilk, which i replaced with tap water. and then i had to wait for everything to cool down again before beating in the egg.

still, i think the batter is a little scant for making 12 muffins, though not as scant as that for the banana muffins. i'm also beginning to think that maybe my baking powder has lost its leavening power; the muffins simply didn't rise as much as i wanted them to.

nevertheless, i strived to do better with the snickers and peanut butter muffins. you might be able to guess that this recipe comes from her children chapter, again. but honestly, which adult resists a muffin oozing with chocolate and caramel?
and not as though i had to cook chocolate and caramel to stir into the muffin batter. these chopped up snickers babies are ready-made with those! and you'll see how they melt and give that oomph to the muffins. besides, i was bringing these to the platoon bbq, and i haven't seen an army guy who doesn't grab at a snickers bar, or any chocolate bar for that matter.
in went the snickers and peanut butter muffins. you can see how the chocolate and caramel from the snickers melted and flowed over the tops. (and you can imagine what they were like inside the muffins.) towards the end of the baking, the caramel even boiled and bubbled!
so, the cranberry muffins turned out surprisingly light, much like something i've eaten somewhere in the past before. i guess it's the buttermilk. as for the snickers and peanut butter muffins, is there really a need to tell you how seriously good they were?

the bbq had much repetitive food =( though nothing succeeds like excess, too many chicken wings, hot dogs, crab sticks, otah and satay can mean overkill. have we reached the point where chocolate is the answer, regardless of the question?