Do you want to write a book? Either way, you should definitely make some muffins
So NaNoWriMo starts next week and if you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that this year I'm one of the NaNo Twitter coaches. I've seen so many people scoff at NaNo (I'm sure it will happen this November too), and I was probably one of them, years ago. "Ugh, those people think they can write that much in a month? Those are probably a whole lot of terrible novels! Why would doing something like that make them think they can write?" is what much of the mockery comes down to. And the thing is -- they are indeed a lot of terrible novels! Most first drafts are indeed terrible, but who cares? Part of the point of NaNo, and why it worked so well for me, is to push yourself past all of the doubt and anxiety and second guessing that comes with writing a novel, and just let yourself write it. I was stunned when I found out that The Night Circus, a book that I found complex and well plotted and incredibly engaging, began as a NaNo book. She changed that book a lot in revision, but doing NaNo helped her find the core of the book. Sometimes, forcing yourself to just keep writing lets your imagination flow, and in the midst of a whole lot of garbage, you find that one golden idea that you needed.
Just about two and a half years ago, I hadn't written anything for a long while, but I had an idea for a rom-com about a man and a woman who meet in an elevator in San Francisco and end up going to a wedding together. I'd thought the plot through some, and then jotted a sketchy outline in the Notes app of my phone, but hadn't done anything else with it. And then my friend Melissa, on March 31st, said "I'm doing Camp NaNo in April, do it with me!" And I thought about how incredibly busy I knew work was going to be in April, and then I thought about my little outline and how much the idea excited me, and I said "Okay!" I wrote the first half of the first draft that April, and kept going until I finished the draft in early June. It was the push that I needed to write the story that I wanted to write, and the thing that kept me going was that I had so much fun doing it. And that little book is coming out in just over three months, and you can pre-order it in all of those places you pre-order books! So that's a very long way of saying that The Night Circus is great and you should all read it, and if you're thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, even with just a few days to prepare, you should do it. You never know what could happen!
(Sidenote: NaNo doesn't pay me anything to say any of that, no one pays me anything to recommend any of the stuff I recommend, I do it all from sheer enthusiasm.)
This weekend I got to bring muffins to some friends and their day old baby, and let me tell you, there was so damn much joy in that hospital room it could barely be contained. I made muffins because my friend who had the baby tweeted MUFFINS at me, and who was I to deny her? And I made pumpkin muffins because it's October, the holy month of my birth and also pumpkins, and I had yet to do any pumpkin related baking, which was a travesty. This is a recipe that I originally got from my friend Catherine, but I tinkered with it, and then, after I brought them to my friends, I decided they needed a streusel topping and so I tinkered with it again, and now I think they're pretty much perfect. See how pretty they turned out? My first major tinkering with the original recipe was because it made either 3 loaves of pumpkin bread or 30 muffins, and that was way more than I needed to make, so I went to cut it in half. It cut in half very easily, except that it called for 1 can of pumpkin, and I refuse to ever use half a can of pumpkin. This gets to one of my core beliefs: a can of pumpkin is a single unit of measure that cannot ever be divided. Do you tell people to use half an egg? Great, then don't tell them to use half a can of pumpkin. Don't give me this bullshit "1 cup of pumpkin" nonsense. We are Americans, our pumpkin comes in 15 ounce cans, we are not going to use the remaining half cup or whatever of pumpkin, and we certainly aren't going to roast a whole ass pumpkin and mash it and measure out a cup of it for your pie or bread or ice cream. (I have done that before, so I can firmly say that it's not worth it). I love pumpkin pie, bread, and ice cream, but not that much. So when I cut the recipe in half, instead of cutting the can of pumpkin in half (which, again, is impossible), I used only a quarter of the original amount of oil, and crossed my fingers that it would work, and it worked very well. It means that these muffins are more dense than some, but they're also super moist and pumpkin-y. And then when I made them again this week, I discovered halfway through that I only had half the amount of white sugar I needed, but plenty of brown sugar, so I swapped the sugar measurements, and that worked great too, so I've given you the option to try it either way.
Pumpkin Streusel Muffins
Ingredients:
Muffins:
1 15 ounce can pumpkin puree
2 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil (canola or a neutral oil is best, but I used olive oil this week & it was fine)
1/3 cup water
1 cup white sugar*
1/2 cup brown sugar*
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp ginger
*You can do 1 cup brown and 1/2 cup white and see how you like it that way, either way works.
Streusel:
2/3 cup all purpose flour
6 tablespoons brown sugar
4 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small cubes
pinch of salt
For the muffins: Preheat oven to 350. Line your muffin pans. In a large bowl, mix pumpkin, eggs, oil, water, and sugars. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and spices. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until barely blended (this is the hardest thing for me about making muffins, because it makes far better muffins if you don't let yourself overmix, but I hate seeing the lumps in the batter. I promise, it ends up okay, even with the lumps!).
For the streusel: In a small bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, and salt, and then toss the butter in and mix with your fingers until everything is crumbly and it holds together if you squeeze it.
Scoop the muffin batter into the prepared pans, filling the cups about 2/3 to 3/4 full, depending on if you want regular size muffins or big ones. Then, sprinkle handfuls of streusel over the top of the muffins until they're about covered in it. Bake for 24-28 minutes, let cool in the pan for a few minutes, and then turn out onto racks to cool all the way, or hand to grateful loved ones.
Makes 15 normal sized muffins or 12 big ones.
(You can also use this recipe to make 1 loaf of pumpkin bread and 4-6 muffins, bake the bread for 50 minutes in a well greased and floured loaf pan)
Have a great weekend!
Jasmine
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