Recycling day

Wednesday was another bakery donation delivery day at work. When I got home with my collection of overflow baked goods and saw that I couldn’t squeeze one more smushed muffin into the freezer, I knew that a big freezer clean-out adventure was in order. I combined the day’s goods with the backlog in the freezer and divided everything into four bowls:

I had muffins (blueberry, cranberry, zucchini, carrot, chocolate, corn, and cinnamon):

Cakes (donation sponge cake and Maria’s tres leches cake):

Donation peanut butter cookies:

And frostings! (a combination of actual cream cheese, cream cheese frosting, buttercream frosting, and lemon icing):

Frosting seemed the easiest way to start, so I immersion-blended the collection into this creamy perfection:

I stuck the frosting in the fridge and set to work on the muffins.

I immersion blended the giant bowl of muffins with two eggs, baking powder, and water until it reached the consistency of thick muffin batter. I pressed about half of the batter into this parchment lined brownie pan:

The brownie pan went into the oven at 375 for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, I spooned the rest of the batter into 12 mini muffin cups (unpictured — I dropped them off with the self-proclaimed “sober hippies” who sleep on the street by the Broadway-Lafayette entrance to the F train) and 8 regular muffin cups. I made a little well in the center of each regular muffin and dropped in a bit of apricot jam:

Now, this was not just any apricot jam! This was authentic Russian apricot jam from Olga:

Much to my surprise, the jam had whole apricots in it!

I made sure that an apricot piece found its way into the center of each muffin because we can’t have any baked goods feeling left out!

I set the muffins to the side and moved onto the bowl of cake. I used an electric blender to whip the cake crumbs with two eggs, baking powder, yogurt, and water until I got a cake batter consistency:

Next, I spooned just enough cake batter onto each muffin to cover up the jam:

The muffins went into the oven (still at 375) for 30-40 minutes, as did a parchment-lined brownie pan full of cake batter:

When the oven finished its work, I had a recycled-cake cake and a recycled-muffin cake:

I slathered the muffin cake with a thick layer of the cream cheese frosting and topped it with the cake cake:

I covered the top of the cake with a thin layer of cream cheese frosting …

… so that all the peanut butter cookie crumbs would stick!

I had to, errrr, trim off the ends so that things would be even (and so that I could taste-test, of course):

Ahhhhh, this was soooooo good … but I had to stop myself from eating it all, so I quickly offered it up to Tara for use at her BBQ on Saturday, and she accepted and saved me from disaster!

As for the muffins, I brought them to my department breakfast/baby shower part 2 for Maria on Friday morning (more on that later) before I had taste-tested them, so I didn’t know what to expect.

These muffins actually tasted decent, believe it or not. The apricot chunk in the middle was an excellent touch!

As Nydia said, “Hmmm, these are surprisingly good!” Up next … the full breakfast recap 😀

What is your favorite thing to recycle?

19 thoughts on “Recycling day”

carolinebee says:

August 3, 2009 at 9:47 am

dude this is epic!! You are a recycle-master 😀 Although I would love to see your response (or just laugh) when someone says WOW these are great what’s the recipe??

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19 thoughts on “Recycling day”

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