The year I turned twelve, my teacher asked the class to make New Year’s resolutions. Other kids wanted to pull up their grades, be in the school play or learn to skateboard better. I told everyone that I was going to learn to make brownies from scratch. And then I did. Over the next few months I tested a different brownie recipe every week and eventually started making up my own recipes. I started to notice the things I especially liked doing in my brownie-making so I stuck with them. I like watching chocolate melt on the stovetop, so I only made recipes that used baking chocolate rather than cocoa powder. I discovered that I loved the rich, nutty taste of whole wheat flour and brown sugar, so I used them instead of white flour and sugar. I liked a little spice with my chocolate, so a dash of cayenne and some black pepper went into all my brownies. After a while I realized that with all my substitutions I had stopped following new recipes and was just making my own brownies, the same way every time. They were fudge-y from the brown sugar, nutty and a little coarse from unsifted whole wheat flour, a little bit spicy from the pepper and on days when my father forgot to clean the coffee pot I would pour in a little bit of cold leftover coffee that made the brownies extra deep and full. 

When I got bored of brownies, I moved on to the basic cookie. There were so many variations! I studied the recipe on the oatmeal box lid and left out the oatmeal and raisins. I was left with a delicious cinnamony butter cookie. Then I switched the cinnamon with lemon zest. Then I got rid of all the other flavorings and added cocoa powder and cayenne. I added less flour for wetter cookies, experimented with different kinds of fat. One memorable Saturday I was out of eggs so I added two tablespoons of mustard instead. It actually didn’t come out too badly. I sheepishly told a friend of my parents, a very good home cook, that I had started baking. “Well, you know, the measurements are very important,” he said. “You have to make sure you follow the rules in baking.” That hadn’t occurred to me before. I’d always followed established proportions in recipes, but I didn’t worry if what I had in my kitchen didn’t quite match up with a recipe. For a while I thought I’d been doing everything wrong. I started baking everything from recipes again, like I had when I started The recipes were fine, but I made other mistakes, like over working the flour, that I didn’t make when I was focusing less on a recipe book in front of me. Then I started high school and stopped baking every day.

Eventually, I had to start baking again. I missed my afternoon sugar fix. Recipes often disappointed me, but I’d forgotten a lot of the practical wisdom I’d figured out at twelve when I was baking all the time, and I was afraid to break out on my own. Besides, everyone seemed to have this idea of baking as a precision art. One day I was reading a historical cookbook, and it occurred to me that people made food before they had standard measuring cups. They also did not have standard-ground flours or standard-sized eggs or even standard oven temperatures.

Sugar, when it was available, was sold as a solid cone that had to be grated and chipped for use, not as crystals in a box. People cooked with whatever ingredients they had in whatever condition they were at whatever temperature they could get their potbellied stove up to. There are times when we want precision, it’s nice to get the same cookie every time. But other times you don’t want to make an extra grocery trip or have to wash every measuring implement in the house. And it’s ok, you really don’t have to. Eyeballing measurements is a great skill to have, if you’re a little shaky on it you can measure a cup of flour into a bowl and stare at it until you remember what it looks like. Or dump a cup of flour into your hand, remember what it feels like. They say that professional cooks never use measuring cups. I don’t know if I believe that, a restaurant cook does need for their food to be the same every time. But I know that I don’t need it to be the same every time at home.

My new baking obsession is muffins. It’s just easier to wake up when you know there’s something good to eat waiting for you. I make a dozen on my day off and that keeps me well breakfasted until the next one. I’d never made muffins before until recently, so I looked at different kinds of recipes to see how other people were making them. I knew I wanted something low in fat that was sturdy enough to support different fillings. It had to be whole wheat and it had to last through the week, which meant heavy enough to toast well after a few days. Most muffin recipes involve mixing a liquid with a fat and then all the other wet ingredients, then sifting together the dry ingredients and folding them in until just combined. Almost every recipe I read cautioned against using an electric mixer as it will make the dough tough. I mix mine entirely by hand and am very happy with it. This is one of my favorite recipes, for carrot almond raisin muffins. If you don’t like carrots, almonds or raisins, switch them for apple walnut cranberry or whatever you want instead.

Something to keep in mind when making substitutions: baking soda is an alkaline that makes bubbles of carbon dioxide when it’s combined with an acid and interacts with a liquid. It’s the primary ingredient in baking powder, which also includes an acid (like cream of tartar) in it. This recipe uses part baking soda and part baking powder because the liquid is soymilk mixed with vinegar. The vinegar is the acid that mixes with the baking soda. Baking soda starts doing it’s thing almost as soon as it has both acid and liquid. Double acting baking powder (the most common type in U.S. grocery stores) also starts releasing carbon dioxide as soon as it hits moisture, but the starts working again when it comes into contact with heat during baking. It also takes much less soda than powder to leaven the same amount of dry ingredients, so it’s not an equal substitution.

The Recipe:

Preheat your oven to 350. Line a muffin tin with paper liners.

Whisk together in a large bowl:
1 cup grated carrots (about three or four carrots)
¾ cup soy milk
1 tsp light-colored vinegar
3 tbsp oil
½ cup dark brown sugar (I like to use muscovado sugar when I have it)

Sift together in a medium bowl:
1 ½ cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
¼ cup oat bran or wheat germ (or just regular oats if you want, whatever you have- I like them all equally in these muffins)

Using a wooden spoon or your hands (you will get messy, but that’s half the fun!), fold the dry ingredients into the wet just until combined. If you over stir the flour it will get tough. Remember that your baking soda has already started to work, so keep up with it! Using as few strokes as possible fold in;

½ cup raisins
1 cup chopped almonds

Fill your muffin tins about ¾ full. Bake them at 350 for about twenty-five minutes. They probably won’t get that domed look that coffee shop muffins usually have, and they won’t be the same every time you make them. That’s ok though, they’ll always be delicious.

Chloe Winther is a young urbanite, writer, and food enthusiast. People have used the term "foodie," but she's this fascinated about life, history, and much more. Find her at a farmer's market, cafe, or kitchen near you.