04 December 2009

Disaster recovery (again)

If you were reading this blog back in January, you'll perhaps remember that I resolved to eschew supermarket drink cartons and snacks for the children's school packed lunches and, instead, provide home-made sweet snacks for them. I even got around to posting some of the recipes on the blog, too.

In August, with the new school year fast approaching, I decided to make a huge batch of chocolate chip muffins, which I would then store in batches in the freezer for use later in the year. Luckily, we had occasion to test them before September: we found that they tasted revolting. I had forgotten to add sugar and the overriding flavour was one of baking powder. Not very nice.

For nearly four months I've had this pile of carefully-wrapped muffins in a corner of the freezer, silently mocking me for my incompetence. Every so often Mike would say "What are you going to do with those muffins?", which didn't help at all.



Today I broadcast my problem on Twitter and got some useful responses:
  • Crumble them and turn them into a steamed pudding
  • Use them as the base of a trifle/tiramisu (three votes for this)
  • Make them into something like a bread-and-butter pudding
  • Mix them with a tin of over-syruppy cherries and then add to vanilla ice-cream
I've got so many minging muffins that I think all of these options will be used over the coming months (and if you've got further suggestions, please share them). I started tonight with the bread-and-butter pudding idea. I found a recipe (by a blogger who'd had a similar cake-related disaster) for Twice Baked Chocolate Cake, which I adapted for use with the muffins. I used just milk, rather than cream and milk and I obviously didn't leave out the sugar, as the blogger (Linda) suggests (not this time, anyway). I left the sugary custard mixture to soak into the muffin pieces for an hour so that they would suck up the sweetness and (I hoped) become edible again. The finished product wouldn't win any prizes in a 'most beautiful dessert' show, but it smelt wonderful. The original muffins, on the other hand, looked delicious, which goes to prove what I've always felt about food - looks aren't everything (or even anything).



I didn't tell the children what was in the dessert until they had both declared it "delicious". It was, too. It only used five muffins out of the sixty, so we will definitely be eating this again. Will have to try the trifle/tiramisu plan next...

3 comments:

Lou said...

Very inventive. Congratulations on finding a cure for the sugarless muffins. I left the sugar out of a pumpkin pie once. It tasted awful, but we added extra sugar to whipped cream and ate it anyway.

Anonymous said...

Very funny story and well done for using them so well.

Amanda said...

Lou - I've the same thing with a cheesecake, too. Now I make sure that I taste the raw mixture before I cook anything sweet, just to be on the safe side!