Baking Bad – muffin monsters

How do a rhino and dinosaur pass the time during quarantine is a question I have been asked several times over the past few weeks. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried and had a few secret house parties whilst my photographer works in the hospital. 23 days of lockdown denial was enough for us, so we decided we would learn a few new skills; baking being at the top of both our lists.

Instagram is one of my favourite places to find inspiration, I’ve tried pintrest but I find it too confusing. Costa Coffee have recently been giving out their recipes for sweet treats (I might try and bake them all). Choosing to begin with something simple, biscuits, Unimpressed Rhino was less than pleased to find we didn’t have the right ingredients. Time to go for my second choice, blueberry muffins. We found a stash of blueberries in my photographers lunch box and immediately set of making some tasty treats.

We didn’t have all of the ingredients on the list but I’ve seen many humans improvise when cooking, so I thought I could too.

Ingredients:

• 275g self raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 75g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 225ml milk
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 175g fresh blueberries
• 100g unsalted butter

After raising the kitchen cupboards neither unimpressed rhino or I could find any baking powder, vanilla extract or a second egg. So we decided to improvise and miss out the ingredients we didn’t have, but we did find some almond essence which smelt delicious.

Unimpressed rhino began by putting the muffin cases into the muffin tin whilst I switched the oven on to 200 degrees.

Then we found a huge mixing bowl and some scales to weight ourselves on before putting all of the ingredients except the blueberries and butter in the mixing bowl. I melted the butter in a pan (my favourite job) and allowed it to cool before adding to the flour mixture. Unimpressed rhino had the fun job of mixing it all together. We then added all of the blueberries into the watery mixture. Finally dividing the mixture into each of the muffin cases before letting the cakes cook in the oven for 20 minutes.

Anticipating coffee shop standard muffins I made the both of us a coffee. 20 minutes later I found my muffins had grown into little purple monsters. We waited for them to cool enough to eat them.

I’m going to blame my short arms on the fact the muffins didn’t taste anywhere near as good as the ones you can buy out of Costa. At least they made the humans smile with their monster like appearance.

I think next time I try to bake I’ll choose something a bit easier but hopefully they’ll taste better. Unimpressed rhino and I enjoyed spending an afternoon baking, I initially thought I’d hate staying home. Slowing down is quite enjoyable and I’m finally catching up on my 2019 to do list.

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