It’s a working weekend in our household, which means that Brian was off to the office shortly after the alarm this morning, and I have been looking for ways to procrastinate on the elephant-in-the-corner project that is sitting in my laptop bag, smelling like a scary deadline. Rather than hit the ground running on that, I opted to bake for Brian’s team, who are working on a cool, top-secret project this weekend. To show my support for the team, I made some muffins that I thought would appeal to a group of programmers – the highly caffeinated kind. 

It is my responsibility to warm you ahead of time that these muffins received mixed reviews all over. Brian tried them right out of the oven and didn’t care for them – in fact, his exact words were “these taste like I’m eating a used coffee filter”. With that kind of review, I almost chucked them in the garbage. Later, I tried one myself and found their wispy mocha flavor and soft, fluffy texture to be sort of delightful. Then Brian told me that one of his colleagues thought so too. In conclusion, these are either your kind of thing, or they are not. We think maybe that they are better when they have had time to cool completely.

I used our Bialetti espresso maker to make strong espresso coffee for the recipe. Because these muffins were spur of the moment, I used an ice bath to accelerate the cooling process.

I was pretty excited to use my awesome new set of measuring cups for the first time this morning. Here is the 1/3 cup being used for the first time to measure sugar.

In addition to coffee, this recipe also calls for dehydrated, instant espresso. These muffins have some serious buzzzzzzzzzz.

The batter is really easy to make. I recommend that you start with some leftover coffee (very strong) from the day before. I also recommend melting your butter first thing, so it will be cool by the time you are ready for it. Also, the recipe calls for baking for 20 minutes, but pay attention, these took only 15 in my oven.

These muffins may or not be your thing, but they are easy and really worth trying, just in case they are. 1 out of 2 computer programmers agree.

Coffee Break Muffins
Adapted from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp instant espresso powder 

1 tbsp baking powder

½ tsp cinnamon

1/8 tsp salt

1/3 cup packed light brown sugar

1 cup strong coffee, cooled

1 stick (8 tbsp) butter, melted and cooled

1 large egg

½ tsp vanilla

preheat oven to 400 F.

Mix together first five ingredients in a large bowl to combine—add brown sugar, making sure to break up any lumps.

Whisk together wet ingredients. Add to dry mixture just to combine—do not over mix. Lumps are perfectly acceptable in muffins.

divide evenly into lined or greased muffin cups. Bake for 20 minutes (start watching around 15) or until toothpick inserted into center of muffin comes out clean. Let the pan cool on a rack for 5 minutes before carefully removing the muffins. It is suggested that you allow the muffins to cool completely before eating.