baking with smalls

[psocoptera]

We tried using baking cups (cupcake liners, the little paper things) when we made muffins today. PSA: glorping a bit of batter off a spoon such that it plops off into the cup is in fact an *advanced technique*, a fact I did not really appreciate until Junie started working on her half of the mini-muffin tray and immediately got the paper stuck to her spoon, got more batter under the paper than in it trying to get it off, etc. She does fine without the papers - some batter ends up on the top of the tray between the cups, which I'll usually clean up a little before baking, and I often do a quick redistribution between cups to even things up, but none of that is distressing to *her*, whereas having the paper stuck to her spoon was. And I could not figure out at all how to explain what I was doing such that I didn't have that problem, nor do I think she'd be able to imitate it if I could. I think in the future we'll stick with using tons of Pam. Today I ended up taking over the whole tray while she worked on putting larger papers in the big muffin pan for the leftover batter. (She was able to get some batter into those without as much trouble, so I suppose sticking to regular-sized muffins for particularly sticky batters could also work.)