Taking advantage of a fire we made in the back yard to cook pizzas I did another test muffin last night. I used a bigger fire this time, just coals, but more than the previous test.I also broke out the new, oversized, silicone muffin mold. As you can see experimental muffin baking is not an exact science and there were a few issues with escaping batter. That was due to an unstable spacing platform under the mold.You can see the higher heat did a much better job browning the top of the muffin. I guess twig fires might work if you were willing to work that hard, but a good coal bed seems the way to go. That bottom is nicely browned and looking like an actual baked good. The untreated mold released pretty well leaving an easy clean up job and a nicely formed muffin.Here you can see cause of the problem; the folded aluminum foil spacer was too small to hold the muffin as it baked. Uneven heating made the batter rise more on one side and the muffin tipped over. I either need a bigger spacer or a wider platform on top to act as a tray to hold up the mold as it bakes.Enough about the failures, lets look at the successes. Out of the mold this baby looks like something a mother would make in the kitchen at home. Nicely browned but not burned and a bit of character to the  uneven top.Inside you can see this time it baked all the way through. Using twice as much batter and the over sized silicone mold results in a nice sized treat. Definitely going to have to find space to carry a few bags of mix on this next trip to do some field testing, but it tasted pretty darn good here at home.

Hitting the trail for a few weeks so the next round of experimental kettle baking will have to wait for a bit, but I have some other ideas I’d like to try out. Bread or biscuits would be nice I’m thinking, maybe with some jam or honey, though they’d be great plain too after a week or two without. Have to ponder how to make an easy sweet roll out of a bag, but that might be pushing it too far heh.