Plain Muffins

Behold: the strangest muffins I have ever made.

No really. These are weird.

That doesn’t mean bad, but they’re definitely not exactly what you expect when you think “muffin.”

Now that I’ve made them, I think I understand why they were categorized with bread in my great-grandma’s cookbook.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

The recipe is simple. Like, reaaaallly simple. As I looked at the ingredients, I started to realize — I don’t know if I’ve ever had just a plain muffin. The closest would maybe be a bran muffin, but even then, there’s a little something extra to give it that flavor.

These muffins, meanwhile, don’t even have vanilla in them.

Maybe that’s a testament to how sweet our modern muffins have become in comparison. Either way, I was a little skeptical, but hopeful. This could maybe be a good base recipe for plain muffins that could be doctored up in a bunch of different ways.

That’s not the only thing that stood out to me about this recipe, though. There’s also only a teaspoon of butter. I don’t think I’ve ever baked anything with that little butter — it’s usually a tablespoon, at least. Just in case, I double checked the original recipe and yep, it says teaspoon, clear as day. Okay then.

Regardless of my skepticism, the name of the game here is to go full speed ahead and give it a try!

Trying it out

There weren’t any instructions involved in this recipe, pretty much just a list of ingredients. But that’s fine, baked goods tend to follow a pretty standard format of: combine dry ingredients, then add the wet, then stir it all together. I felt pretty confident about my ability to carry that out.

The recipe as written — aka, before modern ovens — calls for a quick oven. I guessed that would mean a pretty hot oven. I found a table from the blog Erren’s Kitchen that said a quick oven would be 400F. That checks out, too; most muffin recipes I found online called for an oven set to 400.

I ran into another little snag when I realized that I only have a mini muffin tin on hand. Maybe a former roommate accidentally packed up my muffin tin when they moved out? Clearly, I don’t make muffins or cupcakes enough to have noticed before now. Since these are quarantine times and we aren’t rushing to the store for muffin tins anytime soon, I decided to roll with it. Mini muffins are basically the same thing, just a shorter cooking time. which, hey, that means I get to try these muffins sooner.

Now on to actually making these muffins. Y’all, I’ll be honest, this “batter” weirded me out. In case you hadn’t yet realized, modern muffins are pretty much cupcakes without the frosting. So I expected a fairly runny batter like one would make for cakes.

But no, these muffins are very different, and the consistency was much more akin to a very sticky dough. This felt almost like making bread. Right around here is when I started to worry that I messed something up. Nope, all ingredients were correct and in the right proportion. This is just how they turn out, I guess.

I popped ’em in the oven for 10 minutes, then gave them another 2 when they didn’t look browned enough. After that, they passed the “poke them and make sure the stick comes up clean” test, so they were done.

The verdict:

Um.

I wanted to have nicer things to say about these. They’re not exactly bad, but they are certainly different. They’re rather…eggy. And in all honesty, they taste like soft, slightly sweet bread.

Which I guess isn’t actually a bad thing, it’s just so far removed from how I expect even a plain muffin to taste and feel that it’s pretty jarring. I’m still not convinced I didn’t mess these up somehow — were my eggs bad and that somehow changed the texture? Based on the consistency of the batter, I’m pretty sure using a regular muffin tin instead of the mini muffin tin wouldn’t have made too much of a difference either way.

If I had to rate these, I’d give them a 2.5 / 5. The taste and texture isn’t really too bad, it’s just nothing special, and certainly not what I’d consider the norm for a muffin. And hey, they rose up pretty nicely, so there’s that.

If you make these, let me know how they turn out — I’m curious if they’ll work better for someone else. If I made these again, I think I’d add some chocolate chips. They could also be good with a coffee-cake type streusel topping sprinkled over the dough before baking.