I hate how school has taken over my life right now, and thus forcing me to neglect everything else in my life: my social life, house chores, my blogs… Essay season also has a way of always making me moody, which really translate into hiding out in my room, away from any possibly social interaction, with a bag or box of chocolate. Total self-destruction.
Last week, I went through a box of chocolates Nicole got me, filled to the top with robin’s eggs, Hershey’s Kisses, and the oh-so-addictive Cadbury Mini-Eggs. I had planned to save it for two weeks later, when I’d actually be trying desperately to get those papers finished and handed in. I even put them away in the dark corner of my closet. Alas, three days later, I found myself putting my hand into an pretty pink, but empty, box. Let’s just say when I’m moody, my self-control is pretty non-existent. My saving grace is that I haven’t gorged through my box of Godiva chocolates. That, my friends, must be savoured…and also saved for the REALLY bad days.
Thus, my stomach has been hating me all weekend. I think I’ve ruined my digestive system with the overload of sugar it got last week. Therefore, I’m banning chocolate from my life this week, which will be a difficult feat considering chocolate is the love of my life. On that note, to get myself out of my moody funk, I turned to my tried and true therapy: baking. Wanting to make a morning treat for my Italian class, I contemplated what to make them. At first, I wanted to experiment with making raspberry white chocolate scones. The coffee shops on campus sell these and a couple of my friends in my Italian class love them. Alas, I just didn’t have time to play around with a new recipe this morning, with the million other things I have to do, so I decided to whip up two batches of muffins. They’re fast, easy, and oh-so-yummy fresh out of the oven.
Again, I had overripe bananas sitting in the banana hammock, so I made banana muffins, recipe courtesy of Muffins (from the Williams-Sonoma Collection). I honestly love this recipe book. There’s some great muffin recipes, and the Banana Nut Muffin recipe in this book is to-die-for. Super moist with a light texture, and packs a super banana power. I always love making a batch of these whenever I have overripe bananas sitting around and throwing them in the freezer as a quick-fix breakfast.
I’m also still trying to finish off the frozen blueberries in the freezer, so I made blueberry muffins as well, although tried a buttermilk-based version this time, inspired by the recipe at Cream Puffs in Venice (great blog…go check it out!), who got the recipe from . I actually learned how to make your own “buttermilk” this weekend, and thought it would be fun to give it a try. The result: heavenly muffins. It has this nice sponge-cake texture to it (kind of tastes like it too), and the citrus zest (I used orange) really complements the blueberries very nicely. My favourite part was the streusel topping, which provides this yummy, sugary-but-not-too-sugary, crunchy top. I did half walnut, half rolled oats for my streusel. These babies also smell divine while baking in the oven, and there's nothing like waking up my roommates to the fresh smell of cinnamon (or uh...accidentally setting off the fire-alarm). All I can say is that these muffins were a huge hit amongst my classmates today. I don’t think I can make blueberry muffins any other way from now on. I can only imagine the results when I have fresh blueberries to work with come summer time!
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