Making muffins for Teachers' Day

There was going to be a Teacher's Day celebration at Charmaine's school tomorrow, so we thought it'd be a good idea for her to sponsor some muffins.

These days, pre-mix formulations are available to simplify the process, so *ordinary* folks like myself don't need to have a degree in Chemistry to put all the ingredients together correctly. For today's kitchen project, we were going to use some Orange Poppy Seed Muffin Mix, which we got from the famous supplier of baking ingredients, Amiplus. There are currently 2 outlets in Melaka, one at Taman Merdeka Permai and one at Bukit Beruang. You can check out more details on their Facebook and Blogspot pages.

Once everything's in the mixing bowl, it's just a matter of stir, stir, stir, until everything evenly mixed together. Don't want to see any uneven lumps in there.

Of course, it's almost always going to get messy in the kitchen, so it helps to have plenty of kitchen towels ready. It was kind of an impromptu event today - originally, we were supposed to make the muffins. We didn't know Charmaine was going to be a "hands-on" person and not just wait for her Papa and Mummy to make the muffins for her. I think we'll get her an apron if she's really that interested to help out in the kitchen.

With the batter all prepared, time to load the paper muffin cups into the tray. When empty, the cups will tend to rise a little, no matter as the weight of the batter will put them nicely in place.

Now comes the messy part. Loading the batter into the cups requires some dexterity (to ensure it drops nicely inside the cup) and also some timing (to move between "drips" so the drop does not land somewhere it shouldn't). Since the batter will rise after baking, you'll have to fill it up to just between half to two-thirds full so that you don't end up with an overflowing mushroom of a muffin (unless you're intentionally going for that kind of effect).

Once a tray is done, I helped to wipe off any accidental spills, since in the oven this will be quite messy as the batter would be in direct contact with metal tray.

And we're ready to load the oven. For consistency, we pre-heated the oven to around 180C. It's a dial knob, not a digital display, so I don't precisely what was the setting. Just a little below the 200C mark. Note also, that this is the SET temperature and not the ACTUAL temperature. Depends on your oven, so in the beginning you'll have to go through a couple of runs first before you can get a "feel" of the correct setting. It's important to realize this if you're say, answering an auditor during the End-Of-Line Molding process, for example.

Once loaded to the oven, I set the timer to ~25 minutes. Again, it's an old-school-styled knob, which ticks down to zero. Never done a calibration against a stopwatch, so again it's more of an art than a science. So, you might want to keep looking through the glass window from time to time to make sure your muffin doesn't end up looking like a lump of coal....

Yes, hot ovens are dangerous, so here's where I took over and put the tray into the pre-heated oven.

There they are, sitting patiently in the oven while they bake, while we sit patiently outside, waiting for the muffins to rise and brown. Once thing that puzzles me is why they choose the yellow, warm lighting for the oven. Is it because of the higher contrast (like streetlamps) or because it makes the food inside look more appetizing? For me, the color of the light makes it hard to figure out what the ACTUAL color of the muffin really is. So, you may think it's been inside long enough, but in actual fact it may still be a bit pale.

Fast forward around 10 minutes, and you can start to see the muffins rise. They seem to burst out from the inside, breaking through the top. I'm not sure if this is what we should see, or if some optimization of time and temperature is required. Argh, there goes my engineering mind again....

While the first tray is baking in the oven, we've already started work on the second tray. Our operation today was fairly small-scaled, so the third and final tray was barely half full.

My wife used a pair of scissors to trim off the excess paper muffin cup so that they appear to rise above the "brim". Just a matter of aesthetic preference, since you may want to leave them as they are.

And there you have it. Another successful kitchen project completed. Here's Christopher doing the final outgoing quality buy-off. Yes, from the look on his face, we've done a good job! :)

Phew, all that hard work is really tiring! So, after a quick shower and change, our junior master baker Charmaine did manage to make it to the bedroom, so even the hard antique chair would suffice. Zzzzz... dreaming of the next baking project, perhaps.... :)