Broken Mayonnaise Zucchini Muffins

As you may recall, in our last episode, we had just left our heroine with the remains of a broken mayonnaise: namely, two eggs, a cup of oil, salt, lemon juice, and a spoonful of Dijon mustard, whizzed together into a frothy, not-at-all-mayonnaise-like, oily mess.

What else has lots of oil and eggs? Muffins! (I concede that the Dijon mustard is not traditional.)

A friend recently brought these amazing cream-cheese-filled carrot cake muffins to work. We didn't actually have any carrots, but what did we have spilling out of our crisper? Zucchini! (Literally. We had extras piled up on the counter because they wouldn't all fit in the fridge.)

Since we were making carrot muffins out of zucchini and mayonnaise anyway, it also seemed like a good day to try to use up a bag of homemade-cake-mix-gone-wrong. (We had a giant ziplock containing 2 parts sugar: 3 parts flour, with 1 teaspoon each baking soda and baking powder for every 5 cups of the mixture, so, you know, pretty easy math.)

We also had only half the cream cheese called for in the recipe (and, OK, yes, it was in the bottom of the freezer, left over from December). I will say, it wasn't so little that it didn't start erupting from the center of the muffins while they baked. (See center muffin in photo.)

Everything considered, it would have been a triumph just for the muffins to come out not tasting of mustard (which they didn't) ... but they were actually pretty darn good.