I planned to proclaim—Ta! Da!—that anyone can make a terrific muffin, anytime. As I always have. Super simple. Super successful. This morning—alas!—I ended up with two dozen burnt-on-the-top, foam- rubbery blobs studded with lush, sadly wasted blueberries. Two were edible. Just. The rest, I presume, are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico via whatever happens to waste water in Santa Fe.
Not that I would ever denigrate anything related to a crumb cake! I make a weekly pilgrimage to a local bakery where I order a creamy cheese Danish sprinkled with crumbs a la français, plus a double espresso. To earn this treat, I make myself walk six miles. It’s not torture, mind. The route is lovely and not gruesomely hilly. And the Sunday morning treats I remember most vividly from my childhood, aside from waffles flooded with real maple syrup: the crumb buns from a German bakery in South Jersey, whose closest kin I joyously found in Frankfurt-am-Main, when I was working the book fair one year.
So what happened to the botched batch of muffins? Stupid me, I forgot to turn a very hot oven down to 350◦ when the muffins went in. The sugar burnt to black so fast all but two were beyond rescue by the time my nose detected trouble. Also, having decided to make two batches at once, I blended the hell out of the batter when I was adding the milk and then the blueberries. Delectable muffin texture depends on a truly lumpy batter. Finally, the butter had got so soft at tropical room temperature I figured I could whip it into the sugar instead of melting it and dribbling it in along with the milk. Result of inattention and bad guess experimentation: foam rubber. Usually I’m an apostle of spontaneity. But, every so often, rules matter. How do you tell when? Ah, well, age does have its compensations.
This tragedy, fortunately, has a deus ex machina. The new chili season has begun. I’d already decided to turn a muffin story into a sumptuous breakfast story by making a green chili omelet.
Everywhere in Santa Fe during these days of late summer there’s the smell of chilies being roasted. This is how it’s done. A huge cage-like cylinder is nearly filled with red or green chilies, then rotated over a bed of coals. When the skins look burnt, the chilies are ready. (Some things are supposed to be scorched. Sigh!)
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