Bran New Death(17)
“I wish I had Granny’s cookbooks here,” I said, standing at the counter and looking at the pile of ingredients uneasily. “The bacon and cheddar muffins yesterday were easy; just a basic, savory muffin recipe. I vaguely remember the proportions necessary for bran muffins, but I wish I was sure.”
McGill came to the door, rubbing his hands together. An unseasonable cold snap had taken hold of the valley. “I smell coffee. Mind if I grab a cup?”
I waved at the percolator on the stove, and Shilo got him a chipped mug from the meager store of dishes.
“We can’t disturb her,” Shilo whispered to him. “She’s trying to figure out a recipe. She promised Mrs. Grace two dozen bran muffins for the old-age home today.”
“Ah, muffins! For Golden Acres? That’s swell.”
Shilo stared at him. “Did you say that was ‘swell’? I feel like I just stepped back into the fifties.”
McGill grinned at her, then sidled up next to me. “Say, Merry, I’ve always wondered, what’s the difference between a muffin and a cupcake?”
Shilo groaned, hand on her head in dramatic fashion. “Oh, you’ve started her up now! Prepare to be lectured. You’ve just enrolled in Muffins 101.”
“Huh?” he said, looking back and forth between us.
I bit my lip to keep from laughing at the tragic look on my friend’s face. She’s just heard the lecture once too often, I thought. “You go feed your bunny, or something, while I tell McGill all about it.” I got the other three sets of my brand-new muffin tins out of the bag—I think I had wiped out the town of Autumn Vale where muffin tins were concerned—and washed them, then dried and lined them with paper cups as I answered McGill. “It’s easy. Most people think that if it’s frosted or iced, then it’s a cupcake, but that’s not so. Some muffins can be frosted, too. Instead, think of the difference between a banana cake and a loaf of banana bread.”
“Okay,” he said. “I got that.”
“Well, with the batter of a banana cake, you can make cupcakes, and with the batter for banana bread, you can make banana muffins. You can do the same with any cake batter or quick-bread batter.”
“Ah!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “Cakes are to cupcakes as, uh, what did you call it?”
“Quick bread,” Shilo, who had not gone to feed Magic, filled in.
“Right . . . cakes are to cupcakes as quick breads are to muffins!”
“Correct!” I scanned my pile of ingredients. I hadn’t been able to find bran at the general store, so I’d bought a big box of bran cereal. “In general, muffins are denser and a little less sweet. They’re a whole lot easier and less finicky than cupcakes, let me tell you, but right now I’d give my right arm for my cookbooks.” Why hadn’t I thrown them in the car instead of in a bin at the self-storage? Because I hadn’t foreseen a retirement home full of seniors needing bran muffins. “Well, here goes.”
“Feel free to experiment on me,” McGill said. “But right now, I’d better get back to work.”
For a few minutes, Shilo was my assistant, but eventually she wandered off, and I was left to work alone. I like it that way, when I’m baking. One batch came out too coarse and dry. I hadn’t let the bran cereal soak up the moisture for long enough, I thought, so I increased the milk content and waited a little longer for the next batch. They turned out a lot better, and I tried another recipe that I vaguely remembered from my grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards, locked in a storage container in Manhattan at that moment. In the end, I had two dozen each of banana bran and peanut butter–bran muffins, and a whole bunch suitable only for the birds. It had been good to cook again, even in the huge unfamiliarity of the castle kitchen, and I had gone overboard, as usual.
Once more I offered McGill lunch, and as we three ate at the long table, I pumped him for information on Sheriff Virgil Grace and his mother, the elegant Gogi Grace.
Gogi, he told me, was a local who had left Autumn Vale to go to college in the sixties; she did the hippie-chick thing for a few years—and had been at Woodstock, it was rumored—then came back to town and married a local boy. She would have loved my mother, I interjected. Mom always claimed she was at Woodstock, too, but then, there were a million or so people there, right? Anyway, McGill went on to explain that Virgil was her youngest, the only one of her kids who stayed in town. With Rusty Turner’s help, she had bought and renovated Golden Acres, a century-old house that had been completely redone, with modern lifts so her oldsters didn’t have to climb stairs.