Walnut-Cranberry-Pepper Tea Muffins!!!!

After much deliberation, planning, postponing, and messaging, we finally managed a 6-person get together. A super mini high school reunion, if you will... 1.4% of my graduating class. I decided to make muffins for the occasion. I've been wanting to try something with pepper and cranberries for a long time, since four years ago, I tried this snack mix that had cranberries, pepper, and pecans, and it was sensational! Who knew that pepper and cranberries went so well with each other?! So, using this honey bread recipe [link deprecated...but it was the Honey Association in the UK] as a guide (funnily enough, though, I didn't use any honey), I made these muffins with a simple sugar glaze. I think I should've put more batter into the muffin cups.

INGREDIENTS

50 g dried cranberries/raisins (I had raisins in mine too)

100 g walnuts (about a cup)

70 g sugar

300 ml cold spiced chai tea

2 eggs

1 tsp black pepper

cinnamon, if you wish.

275 g 100% whole wheat flour

1 mounted tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp icing sugar

1 tsp water

METHOD

1. Mix dried fruit, walnut, sugar, cold tea, and pepper together. Gently beat in eggs.

2. In another bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and baking soda.

3. Add 1/3 liquid mixture to dry mixture. Mix. Add another 1/3. Mix. Add the last third. Mix. You will have a thick, sticky batter that plops rather reluctantly.

4. Scoop tablespoon amounts into un-greased muffin liners (I reused egg tart shells because I don't have a muffin pan). I ended up with 18, but I think that squeezing the batter into 12 liners would've been better because the muffins would've been more voluptuous.

5. Bake on the lowest rack of an un-preheated oven at 177 degrees C/350 degrees F for 13 minutes and let sit for 10 minutes in oven. If you have 12 muffins, you may need to bake for 15 minutes. Stick a fork in a muffin, and if the fork doesn't have goo sticking to it when it comes out, it's done baking.

6. Furiously mix icing sugar with water and lightly glaze muffin tops.

I think that everyone thought that the muffins were a bit strange, but not in a bad way. I really enjoyed them though, so I'll probably make them again for myself. Perhaps I will use stronger tea, and add 2 tsp of pepper. This has very little saturated fat, compared to conventional muffins!!!

bLIMEy...

Although I was fully aware that milk curdles when an acid is introduced, I still thought that it was a good idea to mix 250 ml of milk with 100 ml of freshly squeezed lime juice and its zest. I told myself that I was going to make lime pie filling. No, not key lime pie filling, because I don't have key limes, but just lime pie filling... the delicious, gooey, jammy-pudding filling.

Since I've never made lime pie filling/lime curd before, I thought it'd be an absolutely greatly stupid idea to use artificial sweetener instead of sugar for the lime pie filling. My mum bought a huge pack of artificial sweetener because she thought that it was sucrose :( So now I'm stuck with a lot of artificial sweetener and I'm not sure I want to use it, since it is obviously less superior than sucrose. :(

So, I don't really want to explain how I messed up making lime pie filling, but I basically mixed fresh lime juice (2 limes) with zest, milk and an egg. Then, while the milk was curdling, I added in artificial sweetener. After baking at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, and seeing that everything was still liquidy (and smelled nice), I figured I should just freeze the thin liquid product and make crushed ice.

It then smelled weird and tasted terrible. Oh gosh. b-LIME-y. It was. Atrocious. The texture was gritty, thanks to the milk. There was a millisecond of sweetness and limey-ness. And then, for the next 4 minutes, there was a putrid artificial aftertaste.

Bleh.

So. I mixed liquid with brown sugar, added stuff, and ended up with lime muffin-gluteny-somethings. They're not cookies or cakes or muffins... the texture is slightly rubbery and gluteny. They're not crumbly but there is a neat whole-wheatish-lime flavour and they're really moist... It actually is like a steamed cake! So if anyone wants to try these weird muffin things...

Ingredients

250 g whole wheat flour

250 ml milk

100 g brown sugar

24 packets of artificial sweetener (ew.) OR 200 g caster sugar

Juice of two limes

Zest of two limes

1 egg

1 cup shredded zucchini

2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Mix all ingredients.

2. Bake at 190 degrees C/380 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Cram N Jam

...And Jam-filled doughnuts! Hopefully sticking information into my brain... There were a whole bunch of study breaks over finals week, and this one was set up by the 2014 class board. They had a lot of pizza, doughnuts, chips, baked goods, and ...some pastry thing with animal flesh inside.

So, the irony is that there were NO BURRITOS TO JACK!! I went to Cram N Jam to obtain a burrito.

I only ate a few tortilla chips... :(

I really do like Chipotle, or burritos in general. The one I had at MIT was amazing. So, I wasn't really happy trekking through ten minutes of rain to get some chips.

Close but no burrito. ["Close but no cigar", but I really dislike cigars and cigarettes and nicotene-type chemicals].

There were a lot of doughnuts. Boxes and boxes of them...glazed, chocolate, sprinkles, powdered, cream-filled, jam-filled, sugar coated...

Au Bon Pain also provided various baked goods. I tried a muffin with carrot and raisins in it, which was pretty moist.

I'd figure that with each doughnut being around 300 Calories, each slice of pizza being 300 Calories, random baked goods being 500 Cal [I mean, croissants were the size of dinner plates...], drinks being 140 Cal, and a serving of chips being 140 Cal, the average person consumed at least 1200 Calories withing those 2 hours. I wonder how much energy the brain expends when thinking? Does one expend more if one is more intelligent? Or less? I left early because there were no burritos.

Two more study breaks are coming up in blog posts...

National Apple Day?

Apparently, the 4th of November was National Apple Harvest Day...

I don't believe it is. I just think that commons had a surplus of apples. Either way, everyone literally clamoured to grab chunks of baked apple goods... It was sickening [and I was part of it]. I overheard one of the workers remarking that the consumers were piling their plates with these apple-y goods so fast that they had to keep bringing new pies and cakes out. Again, consumerism demonstrates our inherently greedy personality. I didn't try the apple crumble cake or the pie. I also just mooched off TJ for some apple muffin and doughnut [she didn't finish them, anyway]. In the end, all I actually got for myself was a mini cake, some fritter and a coffeecake.

The coffeecake was extremely moist.

Crumble that I didn't eat.

Amazing AMAZING moist apple cake... with very few chunks of actual apple. The icing was amazingly gooey. I was not aware that this sort of viscous-ness existed. However, on the apple scale I'd give it a mere 20%...

The muffin was just a standard muffin, with an apple-ness of maybe 7%. I only have this picture because the reflection on the table is really pretty. I've never realised how reflective the table is...

Apple cake. Appleness? 40%. The chunks of apple are actually visible and the top was nicely crusted with cinnamony-appleness.

Contrast that to the fritter..

Tasteless doughnut...apple cider doughnut, perhaps, but an apple rating of zero %.

The fritter has an apple rating of 1%. It was fried dough. Coated with sugar icing. There were a few cubes of apple, but this reminds me of the time when I was 6 [or 10?], and my parents' friend bought my brother and I a cake with whipped cream sandwiched inside. After unsandwiching the layers, however, all I found was a thin outline of whipped cream on the perimeter of the bottom cake layer. Hm.

Breakfast at the Comfort Inn

I'm still talking about Boston. Eh, I suppose it's a good thing since I haven't actually eaten anything worth noting, except half a "German Apple Pancake" from the Ritz yesterday with EY, but since I had run there, I didn't bring a camera.

The breakfast at the Comfort Inn was nice, considering that for the past two days, I had been eating stale raisin bagels and mini muffins at the other hotel... with utterly no nutritional value. I went ellipticalling at around 7am since I hadn't run in AGES but I was honestly really tired. Anyway. I ended up drinking a ton of milk and eating a lot of food.

They had these egg patty thingys, which is basically a thin cylinder of some egg material that you microwave for 45 seconds and stick between some toasted English muffins. Come to think of it, I have no idea what that egg patty is. It could be leftover egg pieces from the day before, mashed together and pressed through a mould. It could be some premade egg and maltodextrin mixture. There's probably PHO in it. I don't want to think about it. I love toasted flour products! I ate a piece of processed cheese in the sandwich even though I dislike processed cheese... but I suppose this is some sort of comfort food, since way back when I actually like Mc.D in HK, my brother and I used to get this if we were early enough to get to the shopping centre before 11am. Usually we weren't.

They had a waffle maker so I made some waffles which were really airy and too crispy for me. They actually tasted like inflated wafers without the layered creamy filling. Which I guess wasn't too bad.

Waffle maker!

My brother didn't finish half of his cinnamon bun so I ate it. It was too bready so it conflicted with my previous cinnamon bun experience at Cinnabon, where the cinnamon bun was like a huge buttery pudding thing with an avalanche of icing.

Another sandwich, because I got bored of waiting for the rest of the family. It didn't help, though, because I ended up making tea for my grandpa, coffee for my dad, and waitressing pieces of bread and waffle around to them. Even though we were literally 3 steps away from the food table.

One thing I don't understand: I used one plate. One cup. Everyone else in my family is INCAPABLE of using one plate and one cup. They all used at least three plates. Maybe three cups. One for juice and one for milk and one for tea, I suppose. I don't understand, because I usually eat more than the other members of my family do. So, if using ONE plate and ONE cup is so simple for me, why is such a difficult task for them!? It's not even like what we were eating was going to ruin a plate by drenching it in gravy or something. Like I said, when I go to college, I'm just going to bring my own ceramic plate/mug and metal spoon and try set an example so that we, as consumers, won't be so wasteful.

Mad Cool Grad Partayyyyyz

I have not updated in ages due to:

1. School. I actually had 5 projects.

2. Grad Party planning, and shopping for grad stuff [presents, shoes, dress. Bleh.]

3. Graduation reshopping because the dress I had gotten earlier was too formal. I can not tell the difference between a sundress and a prom dress. Unfortunately, I needed the former and had bought the latter.

So, the past week in pictures... [I don't know why my formatting got messed up, but bear with it].

1. First garden snow peas, thanks to my dad :D We also got our first two strawberries, and a bunch of blueberries.

2. JB's grad party, 19th - pasta was really hard at the top, but not crispy. So, it was hard to bite, but I liked it. Something I noticed is that nobody's pasta has herbs in it... I'm gonna put basil or oregano in my pasta dish at my party :)

JB's dessert. Costco on a plate, pretty much. I didn't know the ingredients of the stuff in the cake [turns out there was trans fat], so I think I should be more wary, next time. Well, now I've decided that I'm not gonna get a red velvet cake for my grad party. Actually, I think that I'm not gonna get a cake. Just get cookies. And pie.


MJ's Grad Party - 19th - This is the best damn picture ever... you can see the mood - summer chillaxin'. My first legitimate pina colada, and it was great. The crushed ice added a nice touch to it and I could definitely taste the coconut and the pineapple. To cap it all off [haha. Think bottlecaps], there was no alcohol! Yes!


MJ's grad party - 19th - Seriously good mashed potato with peas. Funny how no one is making mashed potato with apple [That's what I ate the first time I had it...], then two types of rice - the browner one had some kinda herb in it that I didn't really like, but the rice wasn't too mushy, which is good. The pasta and cheese was really great. Every party has a pasta dish. And cake. It's just a trend I've noticed.

The garlic bread was okay. The fried plantain was simply delicious... I couldn't decide whether it was savoury or sweet, but the inside was soft and gooey while the outside was crispy. After learning about it through The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver last summer, I've honestly been interested in trying it out. And it was great! MJ's got great food. Seriously. She even had green puffed rice and marshmallow treats, but I forgot to take a picture of most of the food I ate. Plus, I was in the pool the majority of the time.

16th - MP and LS's chem project was about baking, so they made carrot muffins and sourdough bread. I'm not in their class but MP gave me some :) The carrot cake was really nice without the icing, and the bread... It didn't really taste like sourdough; it was crumbly, dry, and the crust tasted the same as the inside. I don't know if I have the authority to make a statement on the definition of sourdough, as I have only had it once before in my life. That time, it tasted much more different from what I ate that day.


13th - NYC with my mum. We were dress shopping as I have stated earlier, and for lunch, we went to one of the NY-style restaurants, where a pound of food costs a certain amount. We went to Speedy's, which is around 36th and 6th, I think [Not sure.] A pound of food costs $9.50 there. I suppose if one was obsessed with eating salads, one could get a ton of lettuce and tomato for a pretty low price.

A's Birthday.

[Note: it is technically 2:27PM on Saturday, but this is what I would've written if I had time on Wednesday. Track takes up my life:( I guess.]
A turned 18 today, and I made her mango-raisin muffins. Yes, muffins, not cupcakes. A.k.a., no butter!! Well, they were really... liquidy, so I wasn't sure whether it was the correct consistency, but after they baked, they were REALLY moist and dense and great. If they had been chocolate, I'm sure it would've been a pudding-cake. Seriously.
One of the "secret" ingredients was BALSAMIC VINEGAR!! Two tablespoons of it, actually.
:) Weird? Yes. But nevertheless cool, and it kept reacting with the baking soda, which I guess definitely did something to the cake-ness of it.
Acetic acid + Na(Co3)2 --> H2O + Co2 + Na+ +C2H3O2-, which, when spectators are removed,
H+ + [Co3]-2 --> H20 + Co2.

I couldn't figure out how to stack 18 cupcakes into the container without smearing the "glaze" at the top. The glaze was made with MikeNIkes and orange juice. Microwaved and mixed. I was going to use green, but then I realised that it'd probably look like slime... so I used yellow, for lemon, and pink, for strawberry [the cherry ones actually look a lot like strawberry MikeNIkes, so I spent a bit off time separating them. The strawberry ones are a bit pinker]. Anyway, my mum finally suggested I use a paper plate... so I did. :) And I wrote a note on it too.

After track, she gave some out and HF said that I should make them for sports awards. I don't really know if she meant it though, because sometimes I can't tell if people are being genuine/fake.

One thing that kinda irked me was that as soon as EC saw it, she said, "Ohhh cupcakes!! Did [HF] make them?", which is kinda... uncool, because I am A's friend; HF and her are just acquaintances. Why would she make A muffins? Not cool.