4:00 am Muffins

A new thing that my body has started doing in the past few days is waking up ridiculously early in the morning ... Like 3:00 or 4:00 am early... All chipper and ready to start the day. Sometimes it's been fun because I can visit or eat breakfast with Nathan before he heads to work or school. But sometimes I just want some more hours of regular sleep time, ya know? When it's dark outside...

Is this my body's funny way of preparing me to take care of sweet Clementine in the night? 

This morning when I woke up at quarter to four, I remembered that I needed to make some cute little muffins for cute little Ammon's baby blessing today. The plan was to wake up at a more normal time, you know, like 7:00 am or something, and bake them before church. But since I was wide awake with nothing to do, I headed to the kitchen and baked to the accompaniment of The Paper Kites on pandora, and crickets chirping in the night. 

I'm a little apprehensive to blog about baking because one of my besties is an amateur baker extraordinaire. And I'm self conscious. Don't judge me, Ashley, but I used a Betty Crocker pre-made muffin mix. 

But before I decided to use the box mix, I actually read a bunch of muffin recipes and found an awesome muffin-making trick that I wanted to try. I am not an amateur baker extraordinaire, so I don't have a reusable frosting bag, but I thought I could execute the Kitchen Magpie's trick with a ziplock bag. Here's a link to the real trick if you want to see the real thing: 

http://www.thekitchenmagpie.com/how-to-make-perfect-mini-muffins-recipe

It's true what the kitchen magpie says about muffin tins being one of the worst things to clean up.

Thank the heavens for cute little mini muffin tin liners! 

Next, I mixed up the batter according to the package directions, 

and then scooped it all into my little ziplock. 

I was feeling pretty awesome about myself at this point, because it was all so easy.

 But not 2 minutes after I took this photo, the zipper popped open 

and batter spilled all over the counter. 

So I rescooped and cleaned up and tried again. 

If you ever use the ziplock trick, make sure there isn't any batter caught in the zipper. 

You'll regret it.

I snipped off one corner of the bag and squeezed batter into each tiny cup- 

much easier than using a spoon! 

Wahoo! Love this trick! The recipe said to fill each cup 2/3 full, but I went a little over board. 

You know you've overfilled the cups when the recipe says you'll yield 48 mini muffins 

and you run out of batter at 26. Oh we'll. 

Now this is what I call major muffin top! They weren't kidding about the 2/3 full. 

But I still think they look delicious! 

Now I'm sitting in my dark and quiet kitchen that smells like cinnamon, 

waiting for a muffin to cool enough to sample, 

before most of the world (or at least this time zone) gets out of bed.

 I'm calling this 4:00 am baking experiment a

Success!