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Muffins. Everyone loves a big, flavorful, golden, hot-out-of-the-oven muffin - breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack -- you name it. I like those big-topped beauties you find at bakeries, with a crunchy crust on the top, and moist, cake-y bottom. At the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, are the muffins that are flat as a Nevada highway -- you know the ones, your mom probably went through a stage of making low-fat muffins back in the eighties, and these were the result. I realized that not all muffins can be glorious demonstrations of baked good greatness, but when I took a look at this recipe and saw buttermilk, 2 leaveners, AND folded egg whites -- I thought these were going straight for the roof.

The recipe is from a book I brought back from my trip to Santa Fe last year. I only bought one cookbook on that trip and this was it.

Allow me to mention a few of the steps I encountered along my morning muffin experiment. I accumulated an unprecedented number of dishes in my sink, there was a point where I had three burners going at once, the oven preheating, and the KitchenAid working at full tilt.

I had to:

-make up a batch of chile-spiced Pecans
-brown a cup of corn in butter
-whip three egg whites into a meringue
-melt a pan of butter (not such a big, deal but means another pot to clean)

It was at this point that you could really start pulling together the muffing batter, you know - dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another. Maybe this doesn't seem so bad, but it's more than I've ever done for a muffin, so I expected these to be damn impressive and tasty.

Let me sum it up for you: A lot of effort for a batch of muffins that barely rose above the rim of the cupcake wrappers they were baked in. Taste? They tasted ok.

There were also a couple of technical errors in the recipe - it never tells you when to stir in the corn, but tells you to stir in the pecans twice. The yield was also off by double - the recipe says twelve muffins, I got almost 24 standard sized. There are a lot of other great sounding recipes in this book, many everyday favorites with strong Southwestern twists, so maybe this one was a bit of a fluke -- Skillet Butternut Squash with Cilantro-Mint Salsa is still on my shortlist of recipes to try, as well Ancho Apricot Cheesecake.

In some of the early entries on this site I didn't request permission to run the recipe I was writing about from the publisher so it won't appear here. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't.

From: Red Chile Bible Page: 136

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