Amoy Street muffin showdown – Missy Muffins vs Bake_Of

C says:

I met Y for lunch at Amoy Street Food Centre today, and after a satisfying (and healthy) meal of fish soup, we decided to undo all that by getting muffins.

There are two muffin stalls on the 2nd floor. A bit of history on them – apparently, Bake_Of was always the more popular of the two. Missy Muffins was forlorn until they got themselves featured on a Channel U show called “Buzzing Cashiers”, in which Quan Yifeng and Kym Ng try to revive flagging food stalls by calling in professional chefs to find out what the stallholders are doing wrong, then teaching them how to improve their recipe.

After the episode aired, customers swarmed to Missy Muffins (“MM”) instead of Bake_Of (“BO”). However, when we were there, it was once again all quiet on the MM front, and in contrast BO was doing fairly good business. We bought a few similar flavours from both BO and MM, so that we could do a taste test to determine which really is better. (We brought some of them home, and Y’s comments are the collective comments of Y, J, Y’s sister, their mother and grandmother.)


Firstly, visually speaking BO looks much more impressive. There’s a big muffin top, compared to MM’s rather small dome. With BO’s muffins a flat $1 each, and MM’s ranging from $1 to even $1.20 or more, BO wins on the economical front.

Now down to the taste test proper.

Blueberry

C – Even though MM’s muffins are smaller, they’re actually denser and more filling. MM’s is also quite bland and features only a few tiny specks of blueberry on top, and none in the middle. BO’s on the other hand, is filled with blueberry jam, making it more interesting as well as tastier.

Y – BO is YUMS. MM only has tiny dots of blueberry, like Betty Crocker. BO’s is done in a jam donut way, with the center filled with jam that oozes out when you bite into it.

Banana walnut

Y – MM tastes as if it uses banana essence, like the kind you can buy pre-packed in supermarkets. BO is YUMS, like fresh banana cake with little black dots.

Double chocolate chip

Y – MM tastes plastic-y and has a strange, smelly, stale ghee smell. BO is YUMS.


I also tried the Cheese, Orange Chocolate Chip and Granny Smith Muffins from BO but didn’t get the same ones from MM to compare. They were good – the Granny Smith one even has a filling of diced cinnamon apples. Oddly enough my favourite was the slightly sweet-savoury Cheese Muffin. It was simple but really fragrant.

So there you go. BO wins this challenge hands down. But outside the Amoy Street battleground, I think the muffins from Chocolat N’ Spice are still the overall victor. I have to get this off my chest though – what’s up with the name Bake_Of?! What the heck is it supposed to mean? It's not even Bake Off, as in challenge. Bake Of what? And what’s that underscore about? Clearly it’s annoying me no end…

A says:

I can only judge like-for-like so I’ll only compare the Blueberry. And since I don’t really like Blueberry, I actually prefer the one from Miss Muffin because it has less blueberries. The Bake_Of one is so full of blueberry that it turned me off.

But overall, I agree with C in that Chocolat N’ Spice is better.