Holy Crap, you guys.

I'm speechless.

Also, I want it.

Muffin Mania!

I've been eating fruit nonstop since we got The News, but even my voracious appetite sometimes has trouble keeping up with the natural process of ripening going on in the fruit bowl. So Thursday and Friday were spent "salvaging" soft fruit, by baking it all into muffins!

On Thursday, I took the soft pears, and made Pear-Walnut-Raisin Spice Muffins. The original recipe can be found here. I used whole wheat flour instead of regular, and added a dash of ground cloves, allspice, and a sprinkling of ground ginger.

On Friday, keeping in mind the bunch of bananas that were never touched, I trawled the pages of Google returns, finally settling here for the PERFECT banana muffins. The recipe calls for white chocolate, and since I had to go out and get white chocolate, (and since Baby Brain is NOT a myth, this first necessitated a shower, and then drying my hair, finding something to wear that would kind of fit, finding my keys when I was looking for my wallet instead, finding my wallet, losing my keys, and then wondering if I'd actually put on deodorant (I probably put deodorant on five times a day, so great is my horror of forgetting)), it was well past noon by the time I got to the drugstore (I'd ordered scans of the ultrasound, and they were being printed there), and then they didn't have ANY white chocolate that didn't have coconut in it, so not only did I use wheat flour, I used white chocolate with coconut in it!

I brought samples of both kinds to my toenail painting appointment, and they were gone by the time I was done, so I suppose they're good! (I've had several of the pear muffins, but I don't usually like baked-banana things, so I haven't tried those yet.)

Here are the remains:



I will definitely fill the cups more when making the Pear Muffins (that's the one sad little one, there, in the middle). I have such a fear of overflowing tins that I usually don't fill them up all the way. The recipe said there would be eighteen muffins, and I ended up with twenty-four, due to my timidity. I did not, as you can see, repeat this mistake with the banana muffins!

Coming Clean (Finally)

While I *did* have a head cold, and was out of commission for a long time because of it, I am also entering the second trimester of my first pregnancy. (Yay) And since I am a wimp about being sick at the best times, my first ride on the first-trimester roller coaster of smells, sights, talking about food, hearing about food, thinking about food, etc. has been eventful.

But now that I'm getting back on the cooking and baking bandwagon, maybe we'll see a little more action around here!