Today’s Special: Building a Better Muffin
Although a muffin is something you are completely capable of making at home, indulging in a bakery muffin often occurs (at least for me). Why? Because they’re much better looking; they have a true muffin top, none of this barely coming up to the edge of the paper liner crap. Now, I know that you can buy those muffin top pans, but as Elaine Benes rightly pointed out, good muffin tops only transpire when they’ve grown out of muffin stumps.

As you can see, I grew a pretty good muffin top, which I’m quite proud of. You can too, just follow these tips:

1. Assess your batter. It has to be thick. If it’s runny, you’ll be out of luck.
2. In addition to greasing your muffin cups, grease the top of the pan where the muffin top will spill out on to.
3. Ignore your recipe’s direction to fill the cups 2/3 full. To get a good top, you’ve got to overfill it by at least a 1/3 of a muffin cup. This will be where you know if your batter is thick enough.
4. Accept that you’re going to get fewer muffins… but they will be better muffins. Fill the remaining empty muffin cups with water rather than leave them empty.
5. Your recipe will most likely ask for an oven temperature of 350-375 degrees. Temporarily ignore. Preheat to 400 degrees. Bake your muffins at this high heat for about 6-8 minutes and then reduce the temperature to the one indicated in the recipe for about the remaining time (you will have to watch more closely toward the end).