If you read the About By the (cook)Book section, you’ll see that I’m no professional. I’m just some girl that likes to follow recipes and trick people into liking me by feeding them delicious food.
So– not everything that I make turns out great. In fact, some things don’t turn out at all!
A few weeks ago we had some overripe bananas laying around and I decided to forego my usual solution of Banana Bread and try to make banana muffins for us to take to work for breakfast. I pulled out a baking cookbook that I bought over the summer– and hadn’t yet used– only to learn that it was published abroad.
What does that mean? That they used the metric system. So, I had to convert all of the measurements and in my haste to figure out how much flour to use, I totally missed what kind of flour to use.
If your recipe calls for Self Rising Flour and you use All Purpose Flour, you must add baking powder and salt. Or else you get the densest, dryest pastry of all time. This website is a great reference for knowing how much to add to make your muffins rise.
I’m not going to share the recipe because it obviously didn’t work out. I just wanted to throw out that Kitchen Tip– always read your recipe carefully. And also– just generally think about what you’re doing. I make doughs, quick breads, cupcakes, etc all the time and I usually need to add baking soda, baking powder, or both (or yeast… the granddaddy of all rising agents), so when my recipe didn’t call for any, that should have been a red flag!
Also– I want to thank Gwen Stefani for her little tune circa 2005 that always lets me know whether or not I’m spelling bananas the right way.
Here are some pictures of the lesson-learned. Because everybody loves food pictures:
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- Misadventures in Baking: Banana Muffins
By the (cook)Book 