MUFF

This morning I took my morning meal with the Minyan Boyz at the local Panera, as dictated by our normal Breakfasty Rotation.

There’s no smoked fish at Panera, and the bagels are bagels in name only, their only resemblance to the Real McCoy being their toroidal configuration. Nevertheless, the coffee’s decent enough, and those who partake of the sweet stuff can choose from a plethora of pastries, cookies, and cakes.

I noticed that, in amongst the bakery treats, there was a selection of muffin tops. Yes, Panera actually sells muffin tops, using the vaguely sexual-sounding sobriquet “muffies.”

Muffies.


A Panera muffin top, AKA “muffie.” Photo credit: Cakespy.

If all this sounds like an episode of Seinfeld, it is. Elaine, who eats only the tops of muffins, theorizes that a shop that sold only muffin tops would be hugely successful. Her former boss, overhearing this, takes the idea and runs with it, opening a shop he calls “Top of the Muffin to You!” Unfortunately, to get the proper muffin top quality, he can’t simply bake muffin tops by themselves: he must bake whole muffins and remove the tops. That creates a serious problem: how does he dispose of the leftover muffin stumps?

I really have no idea how Panera has managed to wrestle this issue to the ground. I envision a murky underground business, one that is conducted in the dead of night behind the store, one in which grimy wads of cash exchange hands and sacks of muffin stumps are quietly heaved into the back of a panel truck with fake license plates.