Square Mini and Whoopie Muffin Experiment

Previously in my Waits N Measures, Baking Pans N Papers article, I mentioned my experiment of using a whoopie pan and a silicone pan that has square wells. I had cake mix powder left from Valentine cake mix cookies for trying this experiment.

I'd not yet tried using cake mix for making muffins. Well, why not try? Use up my half batch of Red Velvet and strawberry cake mix powders. Try a cake-mix-to-muffin recipe. Try a couple of different pan shapes and establish baking times and temperatures. As for pan choices, I had two thoughts:

Square mini-shapes could be cute, especially if the batter flowed over the rim just enough like muffins should. The recipe that came with my whoopie pan made my eyes glaze over—too much information, too many ingredients, too many steps. Soooo, how about using whoopie wells for making Seinfeldian muffin tops? (Take a trip down memory lane about the muffin top episode.)

The Duncan Hines Cake Mix Muffin recipe that I used provides additional recipe suggestions. (I almost always modify recipes that I try.) My only deviation for this one is the cake mix flavor(s), baking pan shapes, and baking time.
My pixstrip shows seven image areas:

1. Implements
2. Dry ingredients (flour, cake mix, baking powder)
3. Wet ingredients (eggs, oil, milk)
4. Silicone pan and whoopie pan with paper liners
5. Batter in the pans, not all wells filled, unused liners removed
6. Baked square (20) and whoopie (2) muffins
7. Closer look at 8 square muffins and the two whoopie muffins (Seinfeld-esque muffin tops)

In my experiment, I used 1/4 box each of Red Velvet and strawberry cake mixes for making a half batch of muffins. You can use a whole box of any flavor. The ingredients I list make a whole batch, which can yield 48 square mini-muffins or 24 muffin tops. If you try round mini-cupcake pans, the yield number will be similar to using square silicone pans, but the tops might not billow over the edge as much.

Note: Yield can depend on the cake mix weight and recipe that you use and how full you fill the wells.
Implements

• large mixing bowl
• medium small mixing bowl
• mini square silicone pans
• mini-cupcake paper liners
• whoopie pans
• regular cupcake paper liners
• pastry blender
• measuring cups
• measuring spoons
• additional spoon for ladling batter if desired
• rubber spatula(s)
• cooling rack for done muffins

As part of the pre-preparation, I shaped some regular cupcake liners for the whoopie muffins and mini-cupcake liners for the square minis. For each whoopie liner, I pressed a liner between a peanut butter jar lid or similar size lid and a whoopie well. For the top- and bottom-row square wells, I preshaped each liner by pressing a square cookie cutter into liners that I put inside the wells. For the middle rows, I simply inserted and finger-pressed the liners. (After I dropped the batter in, I removed the liners that I didn't use.)
Ingredients

• Dry
• 1 box cake mix
• 2 T flour
• 1 t baking powder
• Wet
• 3 eggs
• 2/3 C milk
• 1/3 C oil

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Place paper liners into cavities.
3. Pour the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl, using the pastry blender to blend well.
4. In the smaller bowl, mix the wet ingredients.
5. Pour the mixed wet ingredients into the larger bowl and stir the ingredients until they're moistened.
6. Scoop about a rounded tablespoon spoonful of batter into each paper-lined square well or two rounded tablespoonfuls for whoopie pan wells
7. Bake for about 16 minutes or until the muffins are lightly browned. (Use toothpick test for doneness if desired.) I initially baked for 8 minutes, checked, and baked another 8 minutes. I thought it was nice that both muffin shapes baked in the same amount of time.
8. Transfer the baked muffins onto cooling rack.

It's nice to be able to use cake mix for baking muffins. The number of ingredients are not much more than baking cakes or cupcakes. The density is only slightly more than cake. In the future, if using mini-cupcake silicone pans, mini-cupcake liners easily fit and work fine. One huge difference between using a mini square silicone pan vs. a mini-cupcake pan—24 wells vs. 12, respectively. With the silicone pan, I put a cooky sheet underneath for supporting the floppiness and in case the batter dripped over. Maybe I'll skip the cooky sheet the next time.

If you don't have silicon pans and want to read up on advantages and disadvantages, two sites you can visit are Silicone Vs. Metal Bakeware and Silicone vs metal for shaped pans.

In my Waits N Measures article, I note that whoopie well capacity is 4 tablespoons (12/pan) and regular cupcake well capacity is 5 tablespoons (12/pan). Enough volume similarity to think of whoopie shapes as flat and wide cupcakes or muffins (muffin tops!).

Thinking that I'm more likely to use the whoopie pan more for baking muffin tops than whoopie cookie halves that the pans are originally for. The whoopie pan might be a really good way to bake muffin tops and not wind up with stems like the ones Elaine couldn't get rid of. :-)

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Mini-muffins

This snack is a hybrid of chocolate chip cookies and muffins—a long-time favorite cooky, but softer, and in a smaller, bite-size shape. The cooks.com recipe that I derived my recipe from does not provide the size of muffin pans to use or the expected yield. Fortunately, I have enough experience in baking to infer some unstated information.

• The amount of fluid and flour (+ oatmeal) looked to be enough to equal about one box of cake mix.
• The stated baking time of 22 minutes seemed appropriate for normal cupcake size.

Recipe deviations from the cooks.com recipe
I tend to deviate from recipes that I try out. For instance, I might substitute an ingredient that I have on hand. Deviations and disclosures follow.

• Granulated sugar instead of brown sugar
  (If you'd rather use brown sugar and find yours is brick-hard, you can use the info in my oatmeal cooky recipe for resoftening it.)
• Replacement of 1/8 of oil with sesame oil
  I had hoped to add a nutty flavor, but the nuttiness didn't seem apparent in the results.
• Regular-sized chocolate chips instead of mini-chips
• Mini-cupcake pans and paper liners, baking the batter for 17 minutes instead of 22
• Double-recipe batch, which yielded 72 mini-muffins.
  I made enough to tote to two events that coincidentally occurred on the same day—a workplace potluck lunch and an evening professional organization meeting.

My pixstrip shows five image areas:

1. Implements
2. Ingredients (dry, wet, and chocolate chips)
3. Batter in pans
4. Baked mini-muffins on cooling rack
5. Baked mini-muffins in goodies tin

Implements

• large mixing bowl
• medium small mixing bowl
• mini-cupcake pans
• mini-cupcake paper liners
• pastry blender
• measuring cups
• measuring spoons
• additional spoon for ladling batter if desired
• rubber spatula(s)
• cooling rack for done mini-muffins

Ingredients

• Dry
• 2 2/3 C flour
• 2 C uncooked oats
• 2/3 C granulated sugar
• 2 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• Wet
• 2 C milk
• 1/2 C oil
• 2 eggs
• 12 oz chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. Place mini-cupcake paper liners into each mini-cupcake cavity.
3. Pour the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl, using the pastry blender to blend well.
4. In the smaller bowl, mix the wet ingredients.
5. Pour the mixed wet ingredients into the larger bowl and stir the ingredients until they're moistened.
6. Stir the chocolate chips into the batter.
7. Scoop about a rounded spoonful of batter into each paper-lined well, about 2/3 to 3/4 full. (I filled two batches of 36 wells. YMMV.)
8. Bake for about 17 minutes or until the mini-muffins are lightly browned. (Use toothpick test for doneness if desired.)
9. Transfer the baked mini-muffins onto cooling rack.

Waffle-grid Tortilla Recipe to Avoid

Instead, make use of some tortilla and biscuit recipes that I compiled links to for ideas. My previous blog article was a recipe for making tortillas by using a waffle cone iron. It was an experiment for omitting sugar in cones and saving loads of calories. The sugarless cones did not harden or keep their moldable shapes like the sugary ones, so I decided to call them waffle-grid tortillas and use them for wraps and foldovers.

I wanted to be able to present a recipe that made use of an online recipe for flour tortillas, using my cone waffle iron as a means to cook both sides of the tortilla. The panfry method requires frying one side of a tortilla and flipping it to cook the other side.

As I researched flour tortilla recipes, I noticed a commonality of ingredients, five items: all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, fat, and fluid. Somehow, I veered into looking up biscuit recipes, many of which had the same five ingredients. The major difference between flour tortillas and biscuits were as follows:

• Biscuit dough—at least twice as much fat as tortilla dough
• Tortilla dough—much more handling (kneading/rolling) than biscuit dough (minimal mixing)
• Tortilla dough—one to two "rest" periods of about 10 to 20 minutes each, depending on recipe, but none for biscuit dough
• Pre-cooking shapes—tortilla dough sheet, to dough balls, to flattened shapes; biscuit dough sheet, to shapes cut with a measuring cup or biscuit cutter

I followed a simple tortilla recipe for ingredients, up until flattening the dough balls. Instead of using a rolling pin or palote, I used thumbs and fingers. Instead of pan frying each tortilla, I baked it in my waffle cone appliance, pressing the clamshell down with a couple of hot pot holders. The results looked decent, although a bit thick. I even took pictures of the stages, so optimistic that waffle-grid tortillas (II) would turn out well!

What a surprise and disappointment to discover they are tough! Not one to throw out food, I've been eating some in small bites, spread with butter and lightly heated. I'm emphasizing that these tortillas were not good results! If you infer the process and try your own batch, don't be surprised that you come up with the same chewy results. If you do come up with more tender results, let me know!

Revisiting some of the recipes, biscuit recipes warned of toughness from overhandling, but the tortilla recipe instructions seemed to contradict, seeming to require dough-playing. Another thought that came to mind was compressing the dough while cooking might have contributed to the less-than-desired results, as the actual recipes indicate airy heat.

The following recipe links that I compiled call for the ingredients in common of all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, fat, and fluid:

Flour Tortillas

• http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0%2C1757%2C130189-249197%2C00.html
• http://www.food.com/recipe/flour-tortillas-diaz-101601 (scalable)
• http://allrecipes.com/recipe/homemade-flour-tortillas/ (scalable)
• http://www.texasrollingpins.com/tortillarecipe.html

Biscuits

• http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,164,151169-240195,00.html
• http://oldfashionedliving.com/biscuits.html
• http://vegetarian.about.com/od/breakfastrecipe1/r/biscuit1.htm

The recipes that called for shortening or lard instead of oil required cutting the fat into the dry ingredients before mixing in the fluid. The recipe I used called for oil, which I stirred into the fluid (milk). Most of the recipes called for water for the fluid, but some called for milk. Maybe some knowledgeable cook can enlighten about using milk vs. water, aside from nutritional benefits of using milk.

All my previous articles featuring recipes were successes. This time, I wrote about a failed recipe. In failure, however, lessons learned, with curiosity for a different approach in the future, is an experience gained.