Bite me, Nigella

I LOVE Nigella Lawson!

I first devoured her cookbooks and TV shows in graduate school, where she fed my anglophilia and fueled my desire to live and work in London. Also, for someone living on a budget dictated by an academic fellowship, her recipes seemed decadent: lovely, sinful, expensive ingredients, effortlessly combined for beautiful, casual dinner parties for friends. It was all Utopian and dreamy to watch, especially when my friends and I were subsisting on Chik-fil-a nuggets consumed standing up while reading Ulysses or Middlemarch.

Eventually, I tried some of her recipes. Most were excellent, though a few were disasters -- I particularly remember one really horrible mushroom and lemony pasta concoction which made J. -- a very tolerant guinea pig for my cooking experiments -- actually gag. There were also a few other recipes, especially cakes, which didn't quite work for me, but I chalked most of the trouble up to the conversion ratios from grams to ounces and cups.

I now approach Nigella's recipes with a (slightly) more critical eye, but they certainly haven't lost their allure. I still buy her cookbooks and read them from cover to cover, and I catch her shows on TV whenever I can.

I was very excited when this recipe for Banana Butterscotch Muffins showed up in my gmail last week, from Nigella.com. In true Nigella fashion, they looked and sounded delicious, making me think of Banoffee pie, one of my favorite British comfort foods.

The ingredients for the muffins kept pace with what I expect from Nigella: lovely and decadent as per usual, but not exactly in line with our current healthier eating plan. I knew I couldn't bake them in good conscience. I've been thinking about them for days, so, this afternoon, I decided to try to tweak the ingredients to make the muffins healthier.

I decreased the fat by replacing 2/3 of the oil with applesauce. I replaced the sugar with a lesser amount of Splenda brown sugar blend. And I added whole grains by replacing the white flour with whole wheat pastry flour.

The result?
A baking DISASTER!!

I was worried from the outset: usually, replacing white flour with wheat flour makes batter direr, but this batter still seemed really wet to me as I filled the muffin pans. I blamed the bananas, and baked the muffins at a slightly lower temperature and for a third longer than the recipe suggested. When they came out of the oven they were much too brown on the top and not cooked in the middle. Even more baking couldn't resurrect them. They're in the bin, and I'm disappointed. Visions of lemony mushroom pasta are dancing in my head.

I'm polishing my critical eye for you, Nigella. Next time, I'll just go with Curtis Stone's recipe for Banoffee pie