Second assignment submitted! Time for a victory muffin. Still sick, sadly - but this made me think of a funny memory. So, story time!
My grandmother as apparently grandmothers do, loved to keep and reuse glass jars and containers (Which is probably where my own jar hoard came from). These included flavoured extract bottles, which sometimes were the same or similar sizes of her brown cough syrup bottles. Sometimes, she would unintentionally put things in their not-usual places. This unintentional habit, combined with my sister's blissful optimism about her baking capabilities, made one day for a very interesting batch of muffins.
My sister, who rarely cooks or bakes, one day felt an urgent requirement to bake some muffins. It would have been fine, if she hadn't realized right before she was finished mixing the batter that she forgot to add vanilla. So, without looking, she whipped open the designated cupboard of mixed and matched things, ranging from plastic drinking glasses, to multiple different sets of salt and pepper shakers each molded after a different type of little character, a ceramic teapot designed like a little house, and various small Tupperware containers filled with a little bit of this and that, only decipherable from the small white stickers and my grandmother's handwriting. After some rummaging, she grabbed the vessel which to her memory, was the one which held vanilla. Without second-guessing or looking at the label, she twisted off the cap, and poured a generous splash in, only to see the muffin batter upon re-mixing it, had turned a shade of pink.
Due to it not being enough in quantity over a batch of 36 muffins to cause any adverse affects, she still baked them, and hoped that it wouldn't have the cough-syrup-ness come through too strongly in the muffins. Although the colour of the muffins themselves when baked did not have much of a pink hue, there was an aftertaste of chocolate and a slight medicinal taste. So, my sister learned an important lesson about double checking containers in my grandmother's kitchen, and when we all got sick that week with colds, our family had cough syrup muffins.
