Oh, Do You Know The Muffin Mom?

    Oh Happy Day!

      I made it!  Or rather, I made them.  The muffins.   It’s official – I’m a bona fide American Mom!

 

    Velvet’s current school, despite being a classic New England boarding school, has a group of very dedicated Moms.  To be fair, it seems to have a group of very dedicated Dads too, though, as per usual, one sees rather less of the dads, and certainly not at “Make A Muffin,” an annual tradition of bringing fresh homemade baked goods to the school for morning snack.  It is organized and executed by the Moms of current students who live close enough to the school to be there at 08:45 in the morning, complete with homemade muffins, which sounds easy, but is it?  It’s a well-oiled machine, “Make A Muffin,” and I was roped into it at a Parents’ Committee meeting, and before I knew what I was doing, I had rashly agreed to make 36 muffins.

    36 muffins is all in a day’s work for a typical American soccer Mom, but I was secretly sweating.  I had never made muffins!  You can search high and low in Russia and you won’t find anything that looks like a muffin.  Except, of course, in that place that pretends to be a BA Executive Club Lounge at Moscow’s Domeodedevo Airport, where they have these small, tight, dry, and slightly tinny-tasting muffins.   But I don’t count them as food, let alone anything as specific as a muffin.

    The world is, of course, divided into cooks and bakers, and I am definitely a cook.  I can make soup without consulting a recipe, I can, and often do, take the contents of my fridge that look like its time they saw the light of day, and make a fantastic pasta sauce from them.  I roast haunches of beef, I can dauphinoise a potato or julienne a carrot, and, thanks to Mom’s recipe book, I make the best chicken liver pate in the universe East or West of the Iron Curtain, but my track record of making baked goods is blotchy.   I worried about it, I tried to work on it, but nothing ever seemed to turn out the way the recipe suggested.  Cakes were flat, pies underdone, quiche dough refused to “set,” and my one attempt to make Yorkshire pudding made me feel that a second attempt would not time well invested.

    My friend Michelle, who went to the Cordon Bleu and can make anything, told me it wasn’t altogether my fault: there is something, and this should surprise no one who has spent time in Russia, about Russian sugar that is heavier than the sugar in the rest of the world.    She said the flour was dodgy as well.    So, I stopped worrying, and whenever someone would say, “what can I bring?” when I’d invite them over, I’d say “Oh bring a dessert,” and we’d end up with a Russian cake…which is made out of spun lard.  Looks super.  Tastes awful.

    Velvet’s school in Moscow was, I confess, uphill work.  Nominally British, it taught subjects in English to the children of the employees of Samsung, New Russians who wanted their kids to learn English, and the children of mixed marriages, like Velvet.  HRH refused to go to any school events after Velvet was 8, because it enraged him so.  This left me all alone on “international day,” when all the children were told to wear their national costumes and bring their national dish for a communal meal.  Parents were allowed – though not necessarily encouraged – to attend, and I would stand around, clinging to my friend Nora, who was the only American in the mix, trying to make polite conversation with Korean women, who nervously clutched their Louis Vuitton bags and nodded vigorously.   We all stood around with the 27 year old Russian moms doing nothing because we weren’t Scottish.  The Scots women had the monopoly on parent participation and they didn’t let anyone in the inner circle.  For her national costume and dish, Velvet diplomatically split the difference, dressing up in her Russian sarafan, the long and elegant traditional Russian folk dress, and elaborate kokoshnik, the beaded, tear-shaped head dress, which we all agreed was altogether more flattering than an Annie Oakley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Pocahontes outfit.  For balance, I made chocolate chip cookies, which is the only baked good item I ever managed in Moscow.  Of course, you can’t get chocolate chips in Russia, but we used M&Ms (try it) and I stuck little American flags into them, which I thought were festive, until I overheard one Scots woman, who had brought a store-bought packet of shortbread say to another, who had sent her sons to school in plaid skirts, “isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever saw?”    

    It was that kind of event.  Mind you, the Korean noodles were amazing, but I yearned for a more interactive kind of school: where they’d be glad to see you, with a Head Teacher who was a.) Sober, and b.) Could identify your daughter in a police line up.  A school where they’d be dying to get you on a committee even if you weren’t from Scotland.

    Be careful what you wish for!  At the current school, I had hardly got Velvet’s hardhat and boots unpacked, but I was immediately drafted onto the “Riding Committee,” which to be perfectly honest I had heard as the “Writing Committee,” and so was pleased and proud to be asked.  And then, before you know it, I had committed to sift the dry ingredients and make muffins.  

    I was cautiously optimistic, despite having always felt that muffins were kind of cupcakes with an attitude problem.   I went to Target and purchased, without any particular difficulty, two non-stick muffin tins.  This kind of retail slam dunk still leaves me breathless and giddy – time was I would have to go to three or four shops to get exactly what I wanted, and ended up with something that would do well enough.   I started to research muffin recipes, and realized that the active ingredient in most of them was buttermilk, which I had never been able to find in Russia (if any readers know – please please please let me know, only it isn’t RYAZHENKO), and this, too, seemed a good sign.  Buttermilk, I knew from my southern relations, was an agent of light and fluffy.

    I settled on lemon poppy seed for my flavor, collated different view points from cyber chefs, bought a lemon zester, and found poppy seeds at the local Stop & Shop.  I was all set to go, when I was brought up short by one of the Senior Administrators at Velvet’s school, with whom I’ve got chummy.  I was telling her all about suiting up to make the muffins.

    “You do know,” she idly threw in to the conversational batter, “that these muffins have to be bite-sized.”

    I took a hefty swig from my martini.

    “”Bite sized?” I gasped.

    “Oh yes,” she said.  “They are always bite-sized.”

    The next day I was up at dawn: making a beeline for Target, where, without any particular trouble, I acquired mini-muffin tins.  Back to the internet for more council and caution.   Back to the Cook’s Resource for mini-muffin paper thingys.    I queued up some unchallenging podcasts on the iPod and dove in to the deep end.

    Muffins, it turns out, are a synch.  They are a lot like living in America: simple, inclusive, uncomplicated, and optimistic.   I made the lemon poppy seed mini-muffins, then I made some full sized Linzer muffins, with raspberry filling, and then I rummaged in the vegetable and cheese drawers of my fridge and culled together scallion, thyme and goat cheese muffins.   Four hours later, I mixed up a fresh pitcher of martinis, collapsed in an exhausted heap, and gazed lovingly at the sheer yardage of muffins gracing my new kitchen island.   I downloaded some more muffin recipes – cheddar and jalapeno, crystallized ginger, sour cream coffee cake…

    Lord, preserve me from scrapbooking.

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