Baking in a Toaster Oven

Toaster Oven Muffins

I baked the funniest looking muffins the other day and I have to share the pictures.  The pictures may not do them justice, but if you imagine gold smurfs you’ll have a good idea of what these looked like.

Here’s the back story.  A few posts ago I mentioned that Kent had converted our oven into a pizza oven with layers of fire bricks.  I’ve been leaving them in the oven in hopes of more pizza or maybe calzone.  Since this blog is about learning I thought I’d use this time to see how our toaster would do in baking muffins.  It is a convection toaster oven.

I decided to use up two muffins mixes I had on hand.  One, because the muffins pans that would fit into the toaster oven only had room for 6 muffins or were the tiny muffin kind.  Two, I was still in a “experimenting” mood and I knew that a commercial mix would yield more consistent results.

Toaster muffins 2

The result – golden smurf muffins.  Both sized muffin pans yielded muffins that rose to a high point and spread out to an almost mushroom-like appearance. Then there is the lean.  This is where the convection oven part comes into play.  The air of the convection most definitely comes from the left side of the oven and caused the lean as well as one-sided browning.

Lesson learned.  And by the way, I’m still waiting for more pizza.  And for Kent to post on his pizza making.

Apricot Bran Muffins

What do you do when you wake up and find seven inches of snow on the ground? You make muffins, of course.

That’s what I did this morning after seeing that yesterday’s snow storm had left plenty of fluffy white stuff all over the ground. On days like this, only a comfort-food muffin will do. And for me that is a bran muffin. I’ve tried a variety of bran muffin recipes and my favorite quick and easy one is from All Bran.

What’s great about this recipe is that it is a basic dough that you can a little extra ingredient to it if you want. Raisins are a common choice. This morning, I had a hankering for apricots so I chopped up about half a cup of dried apricots and plopped them into the dough. I’ve also added the zest of a medium sized orange for a light citrus addition to the flavor.

Another plus is that the ingredients are very portable. When we visit my in-laws, I like to make a meal or bake a little something to help my mother-in-law a little. I can pack up all the ingredients and quickly whip up the muffins with no fuss or muss.