Lucy Liu’s rock hard muffins: get ’em right here

Y’all remember in Charlie’s Angels? When Lucy Liu baked those little muffins and Drew Barrymore hurled it at the door and it was so rock hard it left a dent gaping hole? Well. After my second foray into baking last week, I can safely announce to the whole wide world that yes, my muffins are just like Lucy Liu’s.

Truth be told, I would rather have a toosh like Cameron Diaz (how does that girl shake it baby shake it like that?) but I’m about one fifth her height so I’ll quit while I’m ahead. Lucy Liu’s muffins it is. Let’s continue.

After a remarkably successful first ever attempt at baking, I actually thought I could bake. My naïvety is laughable. In my haste to celebrate, or maybe just desperate to add to my list of skills that is currently nothing, I’d completely forgotten the curse that befalls all humankind: the beginner’s luck.

As I set about baking this second time, there was none of the frazzledness of an out-of-control control freak. I knew to beat with a mixer and fold with a spoon, my confidence egging me on so much that I even planned to give away a half dozen of these supposed-to-be-yummilicious muffins.  Urgh I disgust myself. Too. Fucking. Confident.

I really don’t know where I went wrong.

But like delivering a premature baby, I knew as soon as I removed the muffin tray from the oven that something was deeply wrong. My muffins were small. Tiny. Cute, but all wrong.

I ate one immediately (because they taste best straight out of the oven, right?) but it was brittle and dry, not words you want to hear being used to describe your newborn muffins. Safely tucked away in the air tight tupperware container, I hoped against hope that they would soften, moisten, overnight.  But my hopes were dwindling.

Day two saw the muffins, well, technically not worse but no better. My boyfriend, obviously aware of my heartbreak, ate a couple and said they tasted good. I told him it was ok to gag. Or spit. I don’t mind.

So that was my second attempt at this completely alien thing to me called baking. I’m a trooper though, and I promise to come fighting back better and stronger, maybe not with muffins… but how does banana bread sound?

Anyway, herewith is the recipe. Don’t be afraid of it, there’s nothing wrong with it. All of the wrongness is with me, a completely defective specimen of a chef.  Maple and walnut muffins – FAIL!