Bad Baking

I have been talking about baking pumpkin muffins for a couple of weeks. I decided last night that tonight was the night. I made sure that I had all the necessary ingredients, or so I thought. After adding the dry ingredients to the batter, I noticed that it was more watery than usual. I have made these muffins many times before, so I knew something wasn't quite right. The batter tasted okay, but it didn't thicken like it should have. I went back over the recipe to see if I missed something or if I had put in too much of something, but I didn't. I thought I would cook them for the required amount of time and see what happened, but I wasn't optimistic.

When the timer went off, I pulled the pan out of the oven. What a mess! It looked like the batter had merely boiled in the pan. I think Valerie thought that I must have put too much water in the batter, but I reviewed the recipe and knew that I had measured all ingredients correctly. The only difference I could point out is that I now use eggs from cage-free hens but different eggs shouldn't affect the thickness of a batter. Then I had another thought: the only ingredient that I wasn't mine or bought recently was the flour . It was some that Valerie had in a plastic canister--needless to say, we don't do a lot of baking--at her old apartment, and we've been here for a year. Still, I doubted that the kind of flour could make a difference, but if it wasn't flour in the canister, it would make a big difference. I opened the flour and stuck my finger in it. It was sweet. I tasted it again, and I knew: it was powdered sugar! DAMN!

Of course, we didn't have any other flour either. Valerie offered to go to the store tonight, but I told her that I would bake the muffins tomorrow or Thursday night. I really wanted a muffin tonight, too. (Funny side note: I didn't get angry, which is surprising because I would have been a total bitch about the mix-up in my previous relationship. Valerie really does bring out the best in me.) The worst thing, though, is that now I have to clean up the kitchen, and I didn't even get a yummy muffin out of the work that created the mess.