burnout muffins

Well, I decided to go a little "groove as your soul sings" on the Burning Man quickbread collection. I am hoping that any kind of baked good will be like, wow, homey! in the middle of the desert and I will be more inclined to want to eat veggies&oats&seeds in cookie/tea cake form than some other, you know, healthier form. Anyway, I'm not sure if bourbon beet bread is really one for the books, although I guess I do get credit for inventing it. If you can't have ideas about spectacles of abjection, at least you can have ideas about what kinds of produce & booze you can turn into a cake, right?

Bourbon Beet Bread / Muffins
(adapted from but probably not endorsed by James Beard)

+2 cups (whole wheat) flour (or a little less)
+1/2 cup butter (yeesh!)
+1/3 cup bourbon (double yeesh! if you actually plan to eat this for breakfast, use milk. I mean, or not, I won't judge you)
+1 t baking soda
+1 cup finely grated/pureed roasted beets (I had three roasted beets leftover from the market, hence this weirdass combination. Carrots or apples, for that matter, would probably taste less vegetal. Because right now these muffins taste like, well, beets.)
+1/2 t salt
+1 t ground ginger
+1 cup sugar/sweetener (I am almost out of agave and can finally transfer back to the good old granulated stuff... winging these baking substitutions by the seat of my pants is getting old. All my fave cookies have been coming out "fine" but not "perfect" and I think the secret might be "actually following a recipe". Or actually resisting the urge to dramatically cut down the oil and sugar to "see what happens." I can tell you right now that what happens is that things become less delicious. )
+2 eggs lightly beaten

-Oven to 350, mix all the dry stuff and add the wet stuff. It's ok to stir this puppy until its pretty well combined, you have James Beard's seal of approval, thank goodness. He also suggests that you make toasted cream cheese sandwiches with basically every bread in the book, which strikes me as both ultra-elegant and midwestern-grandpa at the same time.
-For muffins, bake about 20 minutes. For a loaf of quickbread, an hour.