The Muffin Man

I’m not much of a dessert person. All those fancy, restaurant-quality dessert photos, that people post on social media, don’t impress me much. I don’t care for your squiggles of chocolate sauce, wiggles of caramel, and plops of whipped cream on top.

Whipped cream is disgusting, by the way, especially when it goes up your nose. That’s a story for another day right now. I hate when people put off stories for another day. Just tell it! We have all day.

Having worked at a camp, I’ve participated in my fair share of food eating competitions. Most of them were disgusting.

Watermelon was refreshing, but was tough given how hard it is to bite into half a watermelon without using your hands.

Pasta with food colouring was gross. It had zero flavour. Whoever made it definitely didn’t put salt in the water while it cooked. Amateurs. Do you even watch Hell’s Kitchen?

Bobbing for apples was gross, given there was another person bobbing in the same barrel of water. It was like a two for one shower.

Eating through a bowl of jalapeño chips to reach a poker chip at the bottom was just painful.

Picking up M&M’s with chopsticks was downright impossible.

Chubby Bunny was fun. The guy who won, rolled up his marshmallows into thin pieces before putting them in his mouth. There’s your winning strategy, kids.

One of my favourites was a tag team challenge where the kids picked a guy counsellor to feed grapes to a girl counsellor. Why was it one of my favourites? Because I didn’t have to do anything except feed someone else grapes at a gluttonous pace. Fun!

And then there was the one with whipped cream. I don’t even remember what the challenge was, but shoving your face into a plate of whipped cream was involved. It was a mess. It went up my nose, probably in my ears too.

For the rest of the day, the oxygen passing through my nose smelled like whipped cream. It was awful. But that’s not the reason why I hate whipped cream. It just tastes really bad.

End of (long-winded) story.

I’m more of a cookie, cake, donut, cupcake, and muffin, kinda guy. You know, all the healthy ones.

Special shoutout to the cinnamon danishes at my university. You were a wonderful breakfast, snack, and dessert. I miss you dearly.

When I was a kid, Hostess Cupcakes were my favourite.

And then somewhere around 2007, they changed the recipe! The number of swirls on top changed. The chocolate on top became softer. The cake part was different. Who even cares about the cream in the middle at this point.

I’ve been bitter about it ever since. I don’t eat Hostess Cupcakes anymore.

When it comes to muffins, chocolate chip is my flavour of choice. I’ve never understood why you’d want to ruin a dessert by adding fruit to it.

Time for another story.

In high school, I was on the intramural council. We wanted to do a Secret Santa gift exchange and go out for dinner. Sounds fun, right? Well, one teacher on council suggested that we save our money, donate $10 each to charity, and have an ice cream party instead.

I really wish I could go back and say, “No”, to that because I was probably the only one in the room who could’ve said, “No”, and immediately received everyone’s support.

But at the time, how are you supposed to say you don’t want to give money to charity around Christmas? You can’t. We were handcuffed.

The teachers supplied the ice cream and large, yellow plastic bowls, which left me scarred for life. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

The students – there were about 15 of us – were responsible for bringing in one topping each, which means we were setting ourselves up for a bout of diarrhea.

Oh yeah, this blog post just went there.

Anyway, I’m not adventurous when it comes to ice cream. Give me vanilla, mint chocolate, or banana, and I’m good. I stuck with vanilla since it was there.

I don’t care for toppings, but my scoops of vanilla were looking lonely in my bowl. Plus I didn’t want to field questions like, “Why didn’t you get toppings?” and comments like, “It’s so plain!”

Let me live!

So, I added sprinkles because I like sprinkles. Then I saw some luscious looking strawberries and put a few in my bowl.

I can’t remember if I got anything else, but the first bite was absolutely terrible. Forget the diarrhea, there was about to be vomit everywhere.

There is a high probability that the plastic bowls came right from a shelf in a store. I’m pretty sure we peeled off the barcode stickers before eating.

The taste of plastic had taken over the taste of ice cream. And worse, the strawberries also added their unique flavour to the mix. It was at this time in my life that I realized I like strawberries the same way I like ketchup – on the side, never mixed with anything.

I have terrible memories from that ice cream party.

Moral of the story: LET PEOPLE HAVE THEIR SECRET SANTA GIFT EXCHANGE AND DINNER.

End of story.

I guess this finally brings me to muffins. Ever since my favourite local muffin establishment, Mmmuffins, seemingly closed all of their locations around me, I’ve been on the search for a good muffin to take its place.

Because if there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s a fresh, moist, chocolate chip muffin. It’s been a long time, but I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for.

I present to you, Exhibit M:

Yes, the M stand for Muffin. This post isn’t about Meatloaf.

The muffin in that picture kinda looks like Paddington Bear’s hat from the side, doesn’t it?

This chocolate chip muffin comes in a pack of six, all the way from Peru. My family is now on our fourth pack, in the last three weeks. And by “my family”, I mean me, and sometimes my mom.

Honestly, I’ve had at least one per day. And when we get to the end of a pack, they’re still fresh and moist! Those are the buzz words here.

However! We had a mystery with pack number two. There was a distinct moment when I said to my mom, “We have three left.” The following day, there were only two!

I asked her if she had one, she said she didn’t. My sister said from the beginning she had no interest in them, so that ruled her out. So it must’ve been my dad, the notorious food sneaker, himself.

HE DENIED IT!

For the last two weeks, I’ve tried to catch him in a lie and admit to taking the muffin. I’ve tried to squeeze “….just like that time you took the muffin, right” into sentences to catch him off guard and see if he’d BITE and say, “Yes.”

Nothing. No one is owning up to it.

If you, or anyone you know, has seen a chocolate chip muffin that looks like Paddington Bear, wandering around, please let me know so I can stop accusing my dad.

Anyway, after the first few muffins I ate, I started to get mildly bothered by how sticky they were to pick up. That’s the price of a fresh, moist muffin.

Then it hit me like a marmalade sandwich. Muffins are basically cake. We eat cake with forks. Why can’t I eat a muffin with a fork? And then I got the idea to use a knife to cut it open.

The following photo is security footage of me, the last time I ate a chocolate chip muffin with my hands.

Don’t let the prior Paddington picture fool you, it’s a big muffin. It was like biting into an oblong gala apple.

Whereas with a fork and knife, I felt very professional and important, as if I had a private jet waiting for me, complete with leather chairs, mini fridge, and a server named Giles, who always had a towel draped over his forearm.

I also hated it. This is who I am now? A person who eats a muffin with a fork and knife? Who do I think I am? Regis Philbin?

Semi-disgusted with myself, I put out this tweet.

It started out with a tweet, how could this muffin be beat, it was only a tweet, it was only a tweet.

All this being said, I don’t think I can go back to eating a muffin with my hands. It’s like seeing High Definition for the first time. You can’t go back after that.

Besides, using a fork and knife is far more efficient. I have a whole cutting routine because I’m an exquisite gentlemen now.

Ahahahahaha.

I cut the muffin in half. Then I cut each half in half, vertically. Now I have four pieces in front of me. I chop each of them in half, horizontally.

Now there are seven, regulation size pieces of muffin in front of me. I know what you’re thinking, there should be eight. Wrong. I ate one when you weren’t looking. Keep up!

Om nom nom nom.

Hey, don’t knock it till you try it!

And I say that as someone who berates chocolate milk on a semi-annual basis even though I’ve never tried it.

Whaaaaaaat? Oh, save it.

Eating a muffin with a fork and knife has changed my life for the better. I don’t know how, but I do know that it hasn’t changed my life for the worse, so therefore, it must be for the better.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll try eating soup with a straw. Oh wait, I’ve already tried that. It was not good. Almost as unpleasant as the cup of hot chocolate I was given at the Rest Station during Winter Play Day when I was in Senior Kindergarten.

Yeah, I said it! I have beef with hot chocolate! It burned my delicate, little five-year-old mouth.

I hold grudges against foods, if you haven’t noticed.

I also have a grudge against cantaloupe, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this.

Merry Muffin to all, and to Paul a good bite.

What’s your favourite type of muffin?

Do you eat certain foods with a fork/knife, that most people eat with their hands? 

What do you think happened to that missing muffin from Pack #2? Would you watch a Netflix documentary about it?