A month or two ago, I saw this “awesome” bargain!  It was this cute little mini cupcake maker that makes mini-cupcakes and muffins in like 7 minutes.

GREAT DEAL, or so I thought…  So today, I made my healthier pumpkin bread recipe for my baby girl and decided to dive into the mini-muffin category.  After all, it looks so fun and easy.  (Looks, in this case WERE deceiving.)

The first thing that happened was baby girl decided to test it to see if it was hot.  Thankfully, I hadn’t turned it on yet.  She left the room crying because mommy was displeased with her scientific method for checking the temperature of the muffin cooker.

So, here goes.  I plug it in, let it heat up, set the timer for 7 minutes and open the pre-heated muffin cooker.  In pop 7 mini-muffin cups, then I try to spoon equal portions of dough into the cups. FAIL. 

I cook those puppies up. They weren’t full enough so they looked pretty miserable.

While the first batch cooked, I filled a ziploc with dough and clipped a corner to fill the next batch of cups.  The filling was much easier this time, had a better amount of dough in each cup, and closed it up with the timer for my next attempt at mini-muffins.

As I am preparing my muffin cups for batch 3 in the cooker, I make the executive decision to use BIG muffin cups for some of this.  (Made a dozen – in the oven).

Round 3 go into the cooker and I still had plenty of dough so I made a loaf of pumpkin bread too.  I ended up with 12 full size muffins, 1 small loaf of bread, and 31 mini-muffins that stick to the liners.

DON’T GET SUCKED INTO THE CLEARANCE HYPE LIKE I DID!

Now I will go clean out all the tiny little holes on the “bakery” so I can put it in a cabinet and most likely, NEVER, use it again.