Scratching The Surface of Scratch Muffins

After posting a reader challenged me to make the same cake using a scratch recipe. It took me two hours in total, and frankly, I'm not sure it was worth it -- not yet, anyway.

"Baking isn't all that hard if you remember to MEASURE accurately. You can taste the difference," Erin wrote in the comments of my last post.

Well, I did it; though I can't say that I measured accurately. Last weekend I gathered my flour, baking soda, baking powder, vanilla and eggs to attempt a recreation of Trader Joe's boxed coffee cake mix. Being a beginner scratch baker, I already knew that any attempt at exact re-creation without an established recipe would be doomed to failure, so I used a recipe from Bon Appetit's "Fast Easy Fresh" cookbook.

I still made the cake into muffins, and layered the cinnamon crumble inside the cake with cinnamon sugared almonds like I had done before.

This time the difference was that it took me two hours from start to finish and rather than moist and light muffins, my results were kind of dry and spongy. It's possible that the recipe wasn't cut out to bake in muffin tins instead of cake pans. Do muffins have a greater tendency to dry out while baking, as opposed to keeping all the batter together in a cake pan?

I'm not sure I can make a comparison yet. My boyfriend and his roommate argued with me about the pros and cons of the scratch coffee cake muffins vs. the boxed coffee cake muffins until we were all too confused to remember which side we were arguing to begin with.

I maintain the point that box mixes get an undeserved bad rap. There's nothing anyone can say to convince me that 45 minutes total to bake a delicious and consistently good product isn't an advantage to the boxed mixes.

At the same time, I was quite proud of myself as I pulled the scratch muffins out of the oven. A smile stretched across my face as I glimpsed for the first time the gorgeously golden glory. I even ignored the twinges of pain in my back and my feet sustained from hunching over the mixing bowls for entirely too long. The main point in favor of the scratch version is that I will (supposedly) get better at it, and the process will (supposedly) get faster.

Now, though, I have to go do yoga or running or something to work off the half dozen cake muffins I ate this weekend...