Do you know the muffin man?

He lives on Avenue G. His name is Jay White. Jay ADORES “muh-sins” (muffins). He always asks for them. We have made 4 kinds of muffins this month!

In an attempt to minimize Jay’s mischief while I’m busy cooking, I have recently started parking him on a stool so he can watch and “help” me out. He loves it. He enjoys dumping scoops of flour and teaspoons of salt  in the bowl. The look on his face when he helps is awesome! (Sadly I have to supervise the flour-dumping too closely to get a picture of his joy). Another area of Jay’s expertise is with muffin cups. Instead of a muffin pan, we have a stack of silicone muffins cups that you just put on a cookie sheet to bake. Jay likes to line them up on the cookie sheet and carefully place muffin papers in each one.

My little muffin man. I wish you could see how my apron trails onto the floor when he wears it. Maybe I should make him an apron of his own one of these days.

Muffin inspiration: free fruit!!! We live in the bountiful Lower Yakima Valley, and we’re quickly learning that if you know the right people around here, you never have to buy fruit! We picked our own GALLON of  blueberries this weekend for free, and Jeff’s parents brought us about 2 gallons of big, juicy Rainier cherries gleaned from a friend’s orchard (we ate about half of them before I took this picture). YUM. On our muffin-making spree this month,  we have made banana nut muffins, zucchini muffins, cherry muffins, and blueberry muffins! Yummy yummy.

The muffin was hot so I gave it to Jay while he was wearing the oven mitts, but that didn’t stop him from taking a bite!

Time to chow down the fruits of our labors! Jay doesn’t normally use the tray on his booster seat any more, but I was hoping it would catch all the muffin crumbs. (it didn’t) Since muffins often have TONS of sugar, I experimented with using less sugar and adding half wheat flour to make our muffin-a-rama a tad bit healthier. Results: add a little less than half wheat flour and you won’t notice. I found a recipe with only 1/3 cup of sugar in the whole thing, and that seemed reasonably healthy for muffins, so we used it.

mmm, cherry muffin! The cherry ones were an experiment. They tasted good, but I don’t think they were worth the time it took to removed all those pits and chop up the cherries.

Jay is an all-or-nothing kind of eater. I think he can fit more in a mouthful than I can! He’s been this way his whole life but it still makes me a little anxious, even though he has only gagged 2 or 3 times ever. No wonder we’ve had to make so many batches of muffins!

As for Rose…

…she prefers rolls.