Prepare: muffin mix recipe

I started out my food storage packaging straight up flour--but then I realized, there's not much a person can do with just plain flour--particularly if you can only bring one container of stuff with you wherever you are going.

So now I am making and packaging my raw ingredients together, as biscuit mix and muffin mix. I write the ingredients on each bottle and instructions on how to mix everything up. I feel so much happier when I look at bottles of muffin mix than when I look at bottles of flour. I love that I can just pour it out and mix it up and not have to worry about finding where I put the baking powder or anything. It's all ready to go!

I try and make it as easy as possible on myself, so my recipes are based on 5lbs of flour (that way I can just pour in one whole bag of flour and get started--no measuring that, at least!

MUFFIN MIX RECIPE

Mix together:

- 5 lbs flour (20 cups)
- 5.5 cups sugar
- 6.5 tbsp baking powder
- 2.25 tbsp baking soda
- 2.25 tbsp salt
- 3 tbsp ground cinnamon
- 3 tbsp nutmeg

I pour these all into my normal flour bucket, seal it, then toss it around in my arms for a minute or two to mix it all up. It smells SO GOOD.

HOW TO BAKE
In total, this recipe would require an additional 2.5 c of nonfat dry milk. All told, the recipe calls for around 26 cups of stuff, so as we divide the mix up, we remember that the ratio is about 1 part nonfat dry milk to 10 parts mix. 

So for a 16.9oz bottle that stores 2.25 cups of muffin mix, we need to reconstitute a quarter cup of nonfat dry milk when it's time to mix everything together, along with 1/3 cup oil/shortening/applesauce, and 3.5 tsp vanilla extract if you have it. A 16.9oz bottle will make 6 muffins.

When mixing to eat, you can obviously add things like berries or grated carrots or chopped nuts or chocolate or butterscotch chips or whatever else you want to put into your muffins. Whatever you want!

For a 2L soda bottle, those hold 8.5 cups of mix. If you were to mix the whole thing up for muffins at once, you'd want to reconstitute 5/8 cup of nonfat dry milk, and mix with 1.5 cups shortening/oil/applesauce/mashed bananas etc, along with 4 tbsp vanilla extract if you had any on hand.

A 2L bottle would make up about 25 muffins, by my reckoning.

I do not really plan to make these in muffin containers, by the way. In real life, you can just pour the muffin batter into a cake pan or Dutch oven and bake like that--it is like making a coffee cake. So, whew, no need to stock up on muffin tin liners!

I don't think the nonfat dry milk is essential to this recipe, by the way. I'll have to experiment but that's my understanding. Everything can be substituted. So we'll see.