The Muffin That Started It All and the Ice Cream That Might End It
And a Blueberry Muffin Recipe That's the Base of Any Quick Bread You'll Ever Make
How’s that for a mouthful of sentences for the title and subtitle?
This is typically where I’d deflect and make a gallow humor joke like, “Who knew dead dads could bring people together!” But sincerely, thank you for your kindness in response to last week’s post. A thousand munchkins and myself would agree that “there’s no place like home.” I’m glad you do, too.
I digress. This week’s topic is… muffins and ice cream! Two of my favorite things. The former inspired my career, and the latter made me want to end it. I kid, but honestly, if you saw me Monday evening, not really.
Here is a muffin recipe to end all quick bread recipes! A “quick bread” is any baked good using chemical leavening such as baking soda or baking powder. Also, a muffin is a quick bread.
It is also the recipe that inspired me to start cooking. I couldn’t get over how this recipe - unlike any I’ve seen before or since - relies on ratio rather than measurement. It’s a forgiving baking recipe (rare!) demonstrating that as much as we hear, “Baking is a science,” that’s not always true!
Baking is about balance and intuition as much as the ratio between wet and dry ingredients, sugar, and leaveners. By playing with these levers, you can create different textures and structures of baked goods. Not all eggs will yield the same amount of liquid; sometimes, flour “dries” out. Just talking about this gets me excited!
Just follow it and enjoy! I'll give you all the details in the attachment below. It’s SO easy.
I found this recipe eons ago (I was 15), and I’ve changed it a hundred times. I hope you do the same and that one day, you will have no idea where it came from, but it perhaps sparked a love of baking in you that you didn’t already possess.
And now… we move to ice cream.
Wait! One more thing, blueberries are expensive with a capital “E.” Don’t think I don’t notice! At this point, they’re a specialty food item in my house, so… if they feel too pricey, fear not! Use frozen. The trick is putting them in the batter while frozen and baking ASAP. This will prevent them from thawing and releasing extra juice and water, making your batter a light (but could be beautiful?) shade of blue and a bit soupy.
For the sake of continuing my vulnerability and perhaps simultaneously blowing up any future opportunity to work with ice cream brands or said ice cream brand again, this story is too funny and ridiculous not to share.
Also, there are videos. Pardon the angle.
On Monday, I had a food styling shoot for Baskin’ Robbins.
In a hint of self-doubt during a pilates class today, I almost returned and removed the name, but it’s still here because, honestly, the branding is in the video, and it’s NBD, ice cream melts! No hard feelings.
Lovely brand, great people, etc. Truly, no sarcasm. I’ve worked with their team for years; honestly, they will read this and laugh. They probably are bracing themselves as we speak.
But… we loaded my car full of ice cream (in coolers on dry ice) and headed to Far Rockaway, which, ironically, I had never been to as a New Yorker.
We pulled up to the beach and promptly recognized that we needed a permit to do a shoot. So, I am alone with two options as my most viable places to work: an Amazon card table (approximately 2’ x 3’) on the side of the road or the trunk of my car.
Now, if you’re a New Yorker and have a car (already lucky), you know that trunk is a code word for “storage unit.” So after slinging my saddle, tennis racquet, beach chair, a bag of clothing bound for a donation bin, and a Staub Oval Dutch Oven, which I am gifting a friend, from the trunk to the middle seat… I set up my workstation.
On Monday, New York City might as well have been Oklahoma during the movie Twister.
And in Far Rockaway, it was 100x worse.
The winds were whipping, my ice cream was melting (even in the cooler - with dry ice!), and sand was freaking everywhere. I was scooping. I was running up to the beach. It was melting. All over. Rinse, repeat, more sand, more wind. All the while trying not to get a parking ticket being double parked outside the beach loading zone.
As I write this, it doesn’t sound as funny or terrible as it was in person, and while I wish I had documented it more, I was hesitant to share anything because I’m a God damn professional and should’ve figured it out. And I basically did.
But I’m not God (duh), and I can’t reform melted ice cream or stop the wind or sand. And by the number of curse words in these Substacks, I’m only somewhat professional (here), so… here goes nothing! Enjoy these amazingly insane, embarrassing videos to continue the streak of vulnerability.
So, while one of today’s topics inspired my career, the latter really, really made me question it. Then I took myself out to dinner, ate an entire pizza alone, got 8 hours of sleep (which is a lot for me), and kept it moving.
If you think food styling or being a chef/sometimes talent is glamorous, it is, but sometimes it’s really, really not. Like, really not. What-the-’eff-am-I-doing-with-my-life, not. Think long and hard because it’s a dream spurred by passion, lumpy sums of money, and the occasional hair and makeup for a TV spot…
Okay, bye for now. A happy almost FOURTH OF JULY! xo