Burnt Bran Muffins

I wanted to bring refreshments to an Enrichment presentation I planned to give tonight, so I made refrigerator bran muffin batter last night and planned to cook a few dozen muffins this afternoon. The first batch came out fine, but as I spooned batter into the second round of muffin cups Daniel became very bored and fussy. I worked frantically to fill the rest of the muffin cups and get them into the oven, then I hurried over to comfort my crying baby.

I often find that when I let my baby cry while I rush through some non-expedient cooking task, that task goes unexpectedly awry. So it was today. I cooked the second batch of muffins on the same heat setting, in the same (cooled) pans, for the same amount of time as the first batch, but for some mysterious reason they all burned. I put that batch in the trash, humbly waited until life had calmed down, then I prepared a third batch with Daniel sitting contentedly on my lap. I watched that batch like a hawk its last few minutes in the oven, and it turned out just fine.

No doubt there is some logical reason why one batch burned and the other two didn't, but at this point that doesn't matter much to me. Sometimes the lesson learned matters more than the circumstances behind it.