I wanted new sheet pans. My old ones have accumulated a patina that baking soda and vinegar has not been able to remove. That was the whole reason for going to The Chef’s Store. I’d looked elsewhere but wasn’t satisfied with the quality, style or price. Sometimes the simpler you want something to be, the harder it is to find it. Anyway, that’s all that I was looking for. What I found in addition to that was a mini-muffin tin.
Now, I already have one mini-muffin tin. It’s full size for a regular oven and has twenty-four 1-oz cups. The one that I have now added to my collection is half that size so only has twelve 1-oz cups. It’s the perfect size to fit in our Cuisinart toaster oven. Which also means that I’ll be baking only enough for two, instead of enough for two weeks.
I already have experience making mini-muffins and know that if I want to make mini-muffins from a regular recipe, I have to cut the recipe in half. One box of Jiffy cornbread mix which says it makes six to eight muffins makes 24 mini-muffins. To use this pan is going to take that one step further. It’s going to mean cutting a recipe twice; quartering everything.
The internet has hundreds of blueberry muffin recipes. I chose this one to experiment with. Here’s my cut-down version. (If you follow the link and compare, you’ll see that I didn’t add the almond flavoring and turbinado sugar. As they are not staples in my kitchen, I left them out. If you have them, by all means, add them.)
1/2 c. flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 c. unsalted butter
1/4 c. sugar
1/8 c. eggbeaters
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 c. milk
1/2 c. blueberries
Mix or sift together the first three powder ingredients. In a second bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Add the next three wet ingredients to the second bowl. Mix those together. Then slowly incorporate the first bowl of powder ingredients into the second bowl. Don’t over-mix, but we’re dealing with mini-muffins so don’t leave lumps either. (You can get away with that in full size muffins but not here).
There’s a second concern with mini-baking. When you bake 4-oz’s of batter in a regular muffin cup for thirty minutes it’s because that’s how long at that temperature it takes to bake through to the center of a 4-oz mass. It’ll take proportionally less time to bake to the center of a 1-oz mass. But it’s a logarithmic scale. So it takes half the time to get to a quarter done, and three-quarter’s of the time to get half-way done. So my guess was that it would take about tw0-thirds of the time it would take a regular muffin to bake to bake a mini-muffin. For this recipe, that would be about 20 minutes at 375°F.
