Page 352 - Cupcakes

Once you’ve been baking muffins for a while, you’ll be able to look at the

ingredient list of a recipe and tell right away what you need to do to mix up
that muffin. If it contains butter, you first need to cream it with the sugar
using an electric mixer, then add the egg and other wet ingredients, and fold
in the flour at the end. One thing to remember about muffins from scratch:
You don’t want to overbeat them or they will become tough. Once you add
the flour, that wooden spoon is all you need to mix. The batter will still
appear lumpy, but it is ready to be spooned into the pan.
If the batter contains either vegetable oil or a fruit puree, you can simply
blend that whole batter with a wooden spoon. Place the dry ingredients in a
large mixing bowl and stir to combine. Create a well in the center of the
ingredients. If you have just an egg and one or two other ingredients, place

them in the well and stir to break up the yolk, then stir wet ingredients into
the dry ingredients with 20 strokes of the spoon. If the wet ingredients are
many, you might want to blend them together first in a smaller bowl, then
pour the mixture into the well and use a total of 20 strokes to pull the batter
together.

The exception to all this is when you make a muffin using a cake mix
(that’s a cake mix, not a muffin mix). Because these muffins are sweeter
and contain more eggs, the flour is tenderized by the sugar, fat, and eggs,
and you may use an electric mixer to blend the batter and not worry about
tough muffins.