Bakin' Time! I

We are having a train of national holidays here in the land of Japan. Starting Monday ending on Wednesday, proceeded with a regular weekend, the country of workaholics is now having a 5-day weekend called Silver Week. For a Saturday work bee like myself, it is cut down to 4 days, but for someone who doesn't have the luxury of two consecutive days off on a regular basis (my days off are Sunday and Tuesday), it is a glorious deal nonetheless.

Day 1. And what a beautiful day it is, really! I woke up feeling like baking very, very badly. It's the autumn thing. If love is in the air in the spring as the saying goes, it is in the oven in the autumn, I'd say. Whenever the morning chill starts to linger longer and longer into the daytime, I turn into this crazy baking woman that sees no end of sifting flour and melting butter and pre-heating and re-heating the oven every weekend. And the craziness seems to have arrived this year.

So it beings...

...with banana chocolate chip muffins, a request from my sis (who I know schemes on hawking a few before she goes off for a hike on a mountain with her friend tomorrow).

...into the oven they go!

(23 minutes)

...out with the m'ffins!

Voila!

Yumminess!

Sorry about the poor quality of the photos. My Cybershot was nowhere to be found and I had to make do with my cell phone camera.

I don't have a Stepfordwife friend to exchange recipes with, and I will not post one in my blog (simply because I don't know the measurements by heart and am too lazy to go get the recipe and type here as I read it). Every recipe I come upon, I add something or change the measurements to my liking. And for this particular muffin, I use home-made yogurt instead of milk, melted butter instead of vegetable oil, and chopped-up 85%-cocoa chocolate chunks instead of chocolate chips.

I doubled the measurements and made 8 servings instead of 4. But I see a very quick banishment of the baked, the way my family is wolfing them down.

Until next time,

Sak