MagicallyDelicious

Healthy breakfast?  I mean, normally I’d rather make pancakes or waffles drenched in butter and syrup.  Or bacon.  Or more bacon.  MMmmbacon.  Oh but that’s not what this post is about.

This is a MyPlate recipe, which means it’s balanced and (gulp) healthy.  But don’t let that stop you.  This was a quick, delicious little plate of filling breakfast.  You won’t even notice it’s healthy, I swear.  And if you think it’s too good for you, just sprinkle a little full fat cheese in there.

Check it out and make yourself a lovely breakfast pita for here or on the run – it’s a fork-free alternative to that greasy round puck of mcgrease and it doesn’t take any more time than sitting in the drive thru.  You can grab this delicious breakfast recipe here.

So I have spent a lot of time being disappointed by the way my blueberry muffins look.  It seemed no matter what I did, they were always not super brown on top, and flat.  Flat, flat, flat.

I did some Googling and found some ideas about how to make muffins that look like they came from a bakery with high, domed crunchy tops.  Here are my tips, and a great recipe for blueberry muffins.

Add more baking powder

Muffin batter is a little thicker than other types, and it needs a little extra oomph to rise.  The recipe I used to make these ended up with 4 t of baking powder in it.  I couldn’t taste it and they popped up nicely.

Grease the top of the muffin pan

Add a little slippery stuff to the top side of your muffin tin, not just the cups. As your muffins rise, they’ll spread around the openings of the muffin tin and adding some grease will make them easier to slip out when they’re done. If you forget, just use a butter knife and slowly and carefully release the edges of your muffins as soon as they come out of the oven.

Fill the cups to the top

Most recipes tell you to fill the muffin cups 3/4 full.  You’ll get a little dome, but nothing that looks like it came from the bakery.  Don’t be afraid to fill those cups all the way up with batter.

Cheat a little

Reserve a few blueberries per muffin to drop into the top. That way you can be fairly certain you’ll still have some visible after they bake.

Turn up the heat

For the first five minutes of baking, crank up the temperature to 425 degrees. Yes I know it sounds crazy but you’ll give your muffins a head start on rising, and they’ll brown better. Then just turn down the temp to your recipe’s temperature for the remainder of the baking time.

Make them sparkle

Add a little crunch and shine to your muffins by using sanding sugar on top. Just sprinkle in about 1/2 to a teaspoon per muffin – the larger grains of sugar will remain on top and will be crunchy and sparkly when your muffins come out of the oven piping hot and looking picture perfect.

Give these tips a try and make Best of the Best Blueberry Muffins from AllRecipes.com

Tonight I’m writing thanks to my friend Punkin Muffin (you know who you are!).  I went on a “faceless recipe” adventure on AllRecipes.com.  Basically here’s how it works:

1. I search the site for recipes that both sound good and no one has taken a picture of yet.
2. I make the recipe, take the best pictures I can, and rate the recipe.

Sometimes I find gems.  Sometimes I understand why no one has posted a photo.  I mean there are a lot of delicious recipes that just don’t love the camera.  Fortunately this time, I got lucky.  I made three recipes this weekend and all of them turned out well and they turned out to not be too hard on the eyes.

So here is the first – Judy’s Pumpkin Muffins.  This one sounded good so I took a chance – it only had one review before me, so it could have gone either way.  But I think they turned out pretty and tasty.  Very moist, the right amount of spice.  The only thing I’d change next time would be to add a little vanilla and maybe a bit more cinnamon.  They’re easy to make and tasty – highly recommended for you and/or your punkin muffin!

You can find the other very photogenic recipes I made this weekend by visiting my Facebook page.

Image from GoBoldWithButter.com - I've made this twice and haven't stopped to photograph it either time. So you know it's good!

For me, nothing compares to the taste of warm (not melted, not firm, but just warm and spreadable), creamy, fresh salted butter.  The way it melts into the crevasses of a crunchy toasted English muffin, the way it fills all the spaces in the grid of a warm waffle under a cascade of maple syrup.  The way it slides across a stack of pancakes.  What’s not to love about butter?

Ok, there’s fat.  But fat is flavor, and to me, it makes much more sense to use a little butter than to use a lot of something synthetic.  Margarine will never be butter.  It really shouldn’t try.  There’s no substitute for the natural, creamy goodness of melty butter.  It makes everything better.

My newest favorite recipe containing butter is from the fine folks at GoBoldWithButter.com.  French Toast with Honey Butter.  I can’t even describe how mouth-watering this is.  As if the french toast isn’t enough (it’s really pain perdu with brandy…divine!) the honey butter is the best I’ve ever tasted.  It’s mixed with honey, vanilla bean, and some powdered sugar and a little salt to create a butter so perfectly sweet and salty it’s great on everything.  And easy – don’t miss it.

photo: Washington National Cathedral

I’ve heard of lots of names for this day of indulgence before lent:  Mardis Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Fastnacht, Paczki Day.  But pancake day was a new one on me – and I’m on board.  Any excuse for a nice tall stack of pancakes is ok by me.  And since I can’t get a decent version of my beloved paczkis where I live, I will have to settle for pancakes.

The traditions are all the same with different ways to celebrate.  The idea was to purge the house of all the thing you had to give up for Lent – so high-fat high sugar treats are the watchword for the day.  Pancake day is the same idea – make pancakes to get rid of the butter, sugar and flour.  But there’s an even more fun tradition for those flapjacks than enjoying their fluffy goodness on a plate.

Shrove Tuesday was once known as a ‘half-holiday’ in England. It started at 11:00am with the signalling of a church bell. On Pancake Day, pancake races are held in villages and towns across the United Kingdom. Legend has it that a housewife from Olney was so busy making pancakes that she forgot the time until she heard the church bells ringing for the service. She raced out of the house to church while still carrying her frying pan and pancake.

The pancake race remains a relatively common festive tradition in the UK, and England in particular, even today. Participants with frying pans race through the streets running and flipping their flapjacks. In Olney today, a pancake race still takes place every year on Shrove Tuesday.

The tradition of pancake racing had started long before that. The most famous pancake race, at Olney in Buckinghamshire, has been held since 1445. The contestants, traditionally women, carry a frying pan and race to the finishing line while tossing the pancakes as they go. The winner is the first to cross the line having tossed the pancake a certain number of times. Traditionally, when men want to participate, they must dress up as a housewife (usually an apron and a bandanna).

And in the US, the national cathedral celebrates this tradition with their annual pancake race.  I can think of better ways to treat a stack of flapjacks, but it looks like fun to me.  As long as I get to eat some of those pancakes I’m totally on board.  Here’s my recipe for the best pancakes I’ve ever had.  Much like pancake racing, making these perfect is all about the technique.

Click for my favorite pancake recipe

This weekend the MagicallyDelicious kitchen turned out some oatmeal chocolate chip squares, and this banana bread.  I’d been making the same recipe for years, completely content with it.  I’d added my personal twist to it, and it became a staple recipe.  Whenever I had over-ripe bananas to use up, I trotted out old faithful, and it never let me down.

But this time I got wandering eyes.  I wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side.  And I wasn’t disappointed.  The texture was much different from my normal recipe, so I was leery as I poured the very liquid batter into the pan.  It took much longer to bake than my normal loaf too.

It’s just so good.  I don’t know if I’ll go back to my old recipe or not.  I may have to make it one more time to be sure this new one is “it.”  I’ll share the new one with you (unlike our man of mystery, keeping his secret recipes to himself), and maybe you’ll also step out on your normal banana bread.  Leave a comment after you make it and let us know what you think.

My personal twist on this recipe is I replaced 1/2 cup of white sugar with brown sugar (though next time I may reduce the overall amount – it’s a rather sweet loaf), and added 1 t of cinnamon, 1 t vanilla.

Check out Best Ever Banana Bread at AllRecipes.com

I hope the Editor of this site lets this one through, cause it’s good. It’s a secret you see.  A deep dark secret. A secret that could bring down civilizations and change the course of time and any progress my people have made since the fifties. By my people I mean dudes. Just regular beer drinkin, cussin, spittin, woodworkin, car fixin, bread makin dudes’. WAIT A MINUTE! That last one didn’t fit in there.

Yep… bread makin. I told you it was a secret. Men can and do make banana bread. I am proof. I made my first banana bread tonight at 6:30pm Central standard time. Yes I did! I am sure you can tell by my brazen pride and foolish gloating that I don’t do a lot of cooking.  If you thought that you would be incorrect. I do my fair share of making the same meals over and over again (Which will be the topic of another segment). I grill like men do. (Another topic for later) But I do not bake. I am not sure what that is but I just don’t do it.  I am skerred of baking. I do not get the fact that baking soda and baking powder are two different things.  Yeast is a riddle wrapped around a mystery.  But I got brave and baked today.

Why would you do this you ask? I’ll tell you why. For the same reason Lewis and Clark mapped out this country. I got mad.  Now, to be honest, I don’t know that Lewis and Clark were mad. I just needed a reference that seemed intelligent. I think it is a good one so lets just move on. I saw those bananas sitting on the counter getting black. It just made me mad. After all every one thought they were going to eat em. My household saw grand plans for those bananas. Alas that fruit was left to die on the hook it resides on.  So I said “LET’S DO THIS!!!”  Simple as that.

All in all it was an exciting experience. I learned that having a “Y” chromosome does not preclude me from baking delicious treats for my family. I also learned what baking soda does. Ok I lied I still don’t know what it does but the recipe said I needed it so I bought it.  Oh and if you are wondering yes I had to look up the chromosome thing too.

I thought about adding the recipe for this but I am not going to. This way I can call it my secret banana bread recipe that I got off the Internet.

I’m not sure why it is that jams and jellies taste so much better on bread than they do on their own, but I’m thankful that is the case.

Enjoying the first breakfast of my new launch of Weight Watchering – two slices of crunchy whole wheat toast with a sparing amount of butter on each and the same amount of cherry butter.  Yes, you heard me right, butter.  Not “butter” – no spreads or light butter or margarine.  Butter.  My theory is this.

Butter has a lot more flavor than all those other substitutes combined.  So if I use less of a good thing instead of more of a not-so-good thing, my taste buds will still be happy and maybe my waist will be eventually too.

Cherry butter, by the way, is awesome.  It gives that sweetness without being overly tart, and it has a really good texture (something you’ll hear me complain about often I’m sure – yes, I’m a weird, picky eater).  If you see some, buy it.  I got mine at McCutcheons in Frederick, MD.  Good and good for you.

Anyway, random post of the morning.  Now back to work!

Just for the record, there’s no affiliate program for McCutcheon’s.  I just love their products so I’m telling you fine folks about them.

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