Kitchen Fails: Read the $&%@)& Instructions Right

Kitchen Fails: When you should really pay more attention to the cooking instructions

I like making muffins. It is one of my favourite things to make. So when my friend made these great Bran Muffins, and I discovered it was actually from the instructions ON THE BRAN BOX, I was in heaven. It had molasses! I love molasses. It had raisins. I love raisins! It did not and should never have chocolate chips, which I learned from experience by trying it, but that was an honest mistake and not the point of this post and really who would have expected chocolate chips to go poorly in a muffin? Not me!

So I mixed up the muffin batter, remembering what my mother told me to not overwork it and popped it in the oven. The box said 200 degrees C (390 F), so I put the oven at 200 and carried merrily on. And the muffins did not rise. They looked... sad. And not fluffy. And at 18 minutes I realized that my oven was in F and that I had put them on at 200 degrees F and that I had THOUGHT that seemed low but had just reasoned that bran muffins were weird and not bothered to read the instructions properly because come on, how hard was it to get the heat right on the oven?

Too hard for me that evening.

Luckily when I casually left the muffins in the oven at a higher heat for a bit longer they rallied and were totally tolerable. And the next batch was awesome (or possibly a little bit burnt, muffins are tricky. But also pretty hardy, thank goodness. They are like the aloe plants of the baking world).