The Genius of Culinary Parchment Muffin Wrappers

Busy.

The word actually sounds exhausting, like a bunch of bees working away.

One of my favourite tricks is to make a large batch of either cookies or muffins and separate them into plastic baggies - just ready for the wet ingredients.  Then I write the wet ingredients needed on a post-it note and throw that in the bag.

The hardest part about making cookies or muffins is locating the ingredients and the measuring spoons.

So - once I have a recipe, and ingredients AND spoons A N D motivation to make something, I multiply that exponentially to pay it forward.

I will often do 10 bags at a time.  I take 10 coffee mugs and put them on the counter.  Put 10 baggies in the cups and roll the openings over the tops of the mugs.

1 cup flour - 1 cup flour - 1 cup flour ........
1/2 tsp baking powder - 10 x
1/4 tsp salt 10x

So now your favourite recipe has 9 versions just waiting to be made on a day when you want cookies but have no time to do it. This is (of course) the impetus behind cake mixes, muffin mixes, pancake mixes and cookie mixes, but you can really do this at home with better ingredients, less sugar, salt, fat and processed chemicals.  Take one Wednesday night after dinner & treat yourself to this little project.  It's like you're your own factory!

At the end of the day, Harrison wanted something sweet.  I grabbed a bag of muffin mix, added a 1/2 cup of cocoa, some oil and enough coconut milk to bring the mixture together.  Scooped the batter into 12 muffin cups using an ice cream scoop with a release valve so that all the muffins came out evenly.  Sprinkled some vanilla sugar on the tops and studded three dark chocolate nuggets into the top for a dash of extra decadence.

This was my first time using culinary parchment made specifically for muffins and I am positively hooked.  Everyone knows that nothing sticks to parchment, but these muffin containers are absolute genius.  They are beautiful - like little culinary tulips.  Secondly NOTHING sticks to them, so the muffins release easily from the wrapper.  I hate wrappers that cling to baked goods.

Finally, they actually come up over the muffin instead of just covering the stump, so they pack nicely into a lunch bag.

Most of the muffins at the grocery store have huge amounts of fat (some as many as 23g in a single muffin) and sugar (30g???) and loads of calories (480?)  Seriously?

Personally, I like the DIY.  I can use whole wheat flour, coconut oil instead of butter and control the sugar to my taste.