The First Step

So this quarter of school, and my start in Intro to Baking and Pastry began about a week ago, and what I'll be talking about happened a few days before that, but let's pretend like it's new and interesting, mmkay?

So even though I haven't had any classes in my Baking and Pastry course yet, I had the syllabus. That told me what recipes we'd be preparing in class. I also had already read up through the first week in my book, so I learned the methods. The first week was quick breads by the way, stuff that doesn't require fermentation, and so is, ya know, quick. So I knew what we'd be baking, and I already learned how to do it, so I wanted to give it a go on my own first, cuz that's my style.

The recipe in question was blueberry muffins. Simple stuff. For some reason in the places I looked, frozen blueberries was pretty expensive, but frozen strawberries weren't so bad, so I decided to sub those in for the blueberries.

I don't have any pictures of the end product, but it wasn't so hot. They tasted okay, but had a lot of problems. However, it's not bad cuz it was a learning experience. Lame as that sounds, it's true. From my reading, I was able to diagnose problems with the product and so I knew how to fix it for the future.

For instance, there were large holes in the finished product, a thing called Tunneling. This is a result of overmixing the dough. Also, it didn't rise enough. Another result from overmixing as well as problems with the baking powder. I had my attention drawn by other things in the middle of baking so I had to let the batter sit a little bit, so reactions began when the powder met the moisture. My powder is double acting so it still got most of the rise from the heat, but it still lost a little. The next issue was in the strawberries. They were frozen whole, much too large for the little muffins. So I had to defrost them and cut them up. Unfrozen, they led to some issues. The juices bled out into the batter, imparting the color and probably messing with the moisture levels somewhat. Also the strawberry pieces kinda fell apart when baking. My last, worst, and stupidest mistake was in the actual baking. Quite simply, they weren't fully baked. I followed the recipe by the recommended time, took them out and that was it. The insides weren't done on several of them. I have since learned that the best indicator of doneness is color-golden brown and delicious. The culprit lies in my crappy oven, which is a good 25 degrees or so lower than what it says. I've since bought a hanging thermometer, both for home use and for the ovens in class (we'll get to that later). So yea, I really did learn a lot from my poor product.