Hot like an oven!

I used to think that I wasn't very good at cooking, per se, at least the kind that came from the top of the stove.  I had experimented and had both successes and failures in my trial and error procedures, and done alright with a few tried and true recipes.  One thing I knew I could do, kick ass and take names at, however, was bake.

Baking is one of my favorite things in this entire world to do.  I love the science behind it -- you mix this amount of this, and that amount of this, add a certain degree of heat for a certain time, and you get an end product.  Baking is exact, not like cooking which you can admittedly wing at times.  I have gotten the hang of winging cooking (it frustrated R. to no end that it has become my main way of cooking, when he's a 'follow-the-recipe' kind of guy), and have improved on top of the stove. But the oven remains my true domain.  I will always succeed when there is an oven involved.

My roommate jokes that whenever I get sincerely bored, or have a really terrible day, she can tell my the smell of baked goods coming from the kitchen.  If it's something savory and healthy like whole wheat muffins, a quiche, or baked meats, then she would know I was bored. If it was chocolatey, or sugary, it was a very bad, terrible day.

Today, I'm bored.  It's entering the summer rainy season, and R. doesn't get home until later this evening from his conference, and I'm procrastinating on packing (again. It's going to be a theme through next week, trust me).  So I went to my pantry, realized I had some whole-wheat flour, the basics for say, muffins, and some frozen blueberries that needed to be used up.  And what better time than the present, yeah?

I google a lot of baking things, and compare and contrast recipes in order to find ones that I can usually mash together and get a good result. www.cooks.com is one of the main sources for my searches, or www.allrecipes.com.  I found a couple of recipes for whole-wheat blueberry muffins at their simplest, and decided on mainly this recipe as my basis for my muffin adventure.

The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of honey, and while I had honey on hand, I didn't have that much.  So I took my winging skills from cooking and went to work.  I've been baking long enough that I have been able to get a sense of what works and what doesn't, and finally feel confident enough to make substitutions.  If I had apple sauce, for instance, I would have substituted that for the oil in the recipe (but I didn't).

Here is the final version of the recipe that I used:

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup of milk (I splashed a little vanilla extract in, for an extra delicious flavor)
• 1/4 cup of oil
• 1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 brown sugar (in place of honey)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup (really, I just threw a whole bunch in. I love them!) of frozen blueberries

Heating the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, I combined all the ingredients in the bowl, and gently folded in the blueberries.  I filled the cups to about 2/3 way full, and drizzled a small amount of honey on top, and baked them for 20 minutes.

They came out absolutely gorgeous golden brown, slightly crunchy on top from the honey, and super juice from the blueberries which had burst into deliciousness during baking. I think I'm in love with a new recipe, and it works wonderfully.  I'm happy. I have successfully staved off another boring afternoon by baking, and now, blogging.  Now, I'm off to hunt up some more recipes to try in the coming weeks.  I leave you with some pictures of the delicious muffins:

Happy Boredom-Baking!
-A