Peekaboo!

Don't worry, I didn't fall into my oven. But these did fall out...



These gorgeous little nuggets, Vanilla Bean Muffins, were so incredibly and unbelievably moist. A few weeks ago, I employed my very first vanilla bean in this recipe (found in my copy A Passion for Baking by Marcy Goldman). It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, getting the seeds out. Did you know there are over 25,000 itty bitty little seeds in one vanilla pod? I sure didn't.

I ended up with a full dozen of regular-sized muffins (I'd already eaten one in the picture above), so I decided to use the rest of the batter to make three ginormous muffins. I didn't exactly have any of those adorable little paper things to fit the jumbo muffin tin, so I thought a dose of Pam would do the trick.

I was wrong. Despite their sad, piece-y appearance, however, THESE ARE AMAZING MUFFINS. Gone in a less than a week. Even the big ones that lacked proper muffin aethestics.

Today, I ventured into another new recipe. After the success I had with her Mexican Chocolate Chip Cookies, I decided to try out the recipe for Blue Dory Chocolate Chip Cookies that I found on Kate Jackson's blog, Framed.

The recipe is so sinfully simple, with just four basic ingredients: butter, flour, chocolate chips, and maple syrup.

Yeah, you read that right: maple syrup. God's gift to cookie-baking. The recipe called for self-rising flour, which I don't have, but the addition of so much baking powder and salt for every cup of all-purpose flour quickly took care of that problem.

The epicly-long baking time (a whopping 15 minutes) was a bit of a hassle until I figured out that the batter had almost no spread. From there on out, it was 16 cookies to a sheet. I got at least 7 dozen cookies, if not 8 dozen, out of this recipe. I will definitely be freezing a bunch to bring back to Sellew 2.