Fast Blueberry Muffins (at least they would have been if we had remembered to turn on the oven)

What changes, we wondered, would we notice after heating (or cooking) something.  Or at least that is our excuse for indulging in a little ‘therapeutic’ baking on a Friday afternoon.

Our ingredients list had been thoughtfully divided into ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ things.  The dry things were flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.  The wet things were oil, egg and milk.  Solids and liquids.

Take 1 1/2 cups of flour.  Dump it into a bowl.

Scoop up 3/4 of a cup of sugar and add that to the flour.

Carefully measure 1/2 a teaspoon of salt.

Add that to the bowl along with 2 teaspoons of baking powder.

That’s the solids taken care of.

Now the next stage required us to read the directions…..however, in her excitement (and mild panic at the fast-approaching end of the school day) yours truly did not even particularly notice that there were directions.  So we just measured out and added our liquids:

1/3 of a cup of vegetable oil…..

One egg…..

and a 1/3 of a cup of milk…..

These we stirred…..

before adding one cup of fresh blueberries.

Now scoop spoonfuls of the mixture into paper cases.

 

Stand back to admire your work (as well as notice what the mixture looks like before it makes it to the oven). 

A quick glance at the watch (phew; 20 minutes to go – and 20 minutes needed to bake them).  Gallop down the stairs, skither round the door of the ‘kitchen’ and carefully open up the oven. 

Which is cold.  Certainly not the 180 degrees centigrade needed for baking muffins.  Oh dear.

While we wait (a tad longer than we had anticipated) let’s recap what our uncooked muffin mixture looked like.  What was it like?

• yellow
• sticky

And after baking?  What do we expect it to look like then?

• brownish
• dry
• maybe higher

Good news.  Not too much after the official end of school, children were to be seen carefully clutching (fingertips only – they are rather hot!) sweet-smelling just-cooked muffins.  I am not sure how many of them made it all the way home before being greedily devoured, but for the record, this is what they looked like.

Brownish, no longer sticky, definitely higher.  And in addition to the children, I and Mrs Williams and Raamy’s dad and Ryoma’s mum and Evie’s mum (goodness; Evie isn’t even in our class!) can all vouch for the fact that they were (definitely were!) quite, quite delicious.

And they really are, as long as you remember to turn on the oven, Fast Blueberry Muffins.

PS Now, although it quite clearly mattered that we omitted to pay attention to step one (turn on the oven), it didn’t seem to matter that we skipped out step three of the directions (which, for the record was ‘Put the oil, the egg and the milk into a jug; gently mix and pour into the bowl with the dry ingredients).