Tips for Baking Muffins
Here are some tips for baking muffins . If you bake them right, there's nothing like a fresh-baked muffin! The recipes included here use a 12–cup muffin pan, each cup having a capacity of about 1/3 cup. This has become a standard size for the new, non-stick muffin pans and most aluminum pans for sale. If your pan has larger or smaller cups, adjust the baking time by about five minutes more for the larger muffins, five minutes less for the smaller ones. If muffins in the small cups get too brown, reduce the oven temperature to 375°F. Most muffin recipes offer dire warnings: Don't overmix! Fill muffin cups only a fraction of the way—from 1/2 to 2/3. Ignore all this and use common sense. Don't be afraid to stir the ingredients together until they look like batter. Just remember not to use an electric mixer, since beating the batter will produce hockey pucks. And fill the cups as much as you want to. The idea is to bake some muffins, not worry about what fraction of...