bits & pieces

It's gorgeous outside, but I want to catch up. So let's make this short, okay? :)

This week involved:

photo from www.cafeshelburne.com

1. Eating out! It was the first-ever Vermont Restaurant Week and I took advantage of the prix-fixe menus and tried out some tempting restaurants I'd never visited before: Café Shelburne and Bistro Sauce. I swoon just thinking of my meal at the first one (and you can read what I had to say about it here). Yum.

2. Flowers. Lovely white bleeding hearts and lillies of the valley, specifically.

3. This tasty pasta — even tastier served cold as a sort of pasta salad — based, very loosely, on this tomato and olive penne from Love and Olive Oil.

What made you smile this week?

banana chocolate chip muffins

You guys... These are sad muffins.

I know, they look so cute! How could I not want to devour these?! But we're about honesty here, right? I tell you about crappy vacations, cheesecake withdrawal... heck, I even post unfortunate photos like these. And we bond over it all. At least, that's what I like to think. You guys don't comment very often (wink wink, nudge nudge), so I'm not exactly sure what you think. But holding up my end of the bargain, let's talk about sad muffins.

I've told you about my muffin obsession before. So I thought I'd do something about it and whip up a fantastically good batch on my own. Problem was, every time I can remember having made muffins in the past, they were seriously lacking. There was a batch of blueberry muffins that tasted, inexplicably, like Play-Doh. But I was sure this time would be different, especially with a bananas-and-chocolate recipe in hand.

But, as much as Dave tried to tell me these were delicious, they just weren't. At all. The recipe specified to mix the ingredients until just combined, and I ended up with — gasp — bitter clumps of baking powder. And altogether flat, dry, un-banana-y muffins that were more of a vehicle for chocolate consumption than anything else.

So... share with me your favorite muffin recipes. Pretty please? Or share with me your baking failures. We all have sad muffin days once in a while, right? And then we move on.

Sad Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

Um. Obviously I don't really recommend this recipe... but just in case you were curious.

1 egg

3 large bananas, finely mashed

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup canola oil

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 cup chocolate chips

3 tablespoons baking powder

dash of salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line muffin tray with muffin cups.

Beat egg in a large bowl. Add milk, oil and mashed bananas and mix well. Stir in the remaining ingredients until flour is just dissolved.

Spoon into muffin cups. Sprinkle with additional sugar or chocolate chips. Bake 15-20 minutes. Immediately remove from pan.