This June will officially mark 18 years that I’ve been living in New York City. I have lived more of my life now on the East Coast than the West, and that feels kind of strange to acknowledge out loud. When people think of things that mark their new lives in a new place, especially in a concrete jungle like New York where tiny apartments and even tinier kitchens are the norm, most of them probably do not think about the kitchen gear they started with.

But I do. I still remember when I had to build my original kitchen from scratch, I slowly but surely made visits to the Kmart (RIP — one at Astor Place in Manhattan, which has since been replaced by the massive Wegman’s) and to Target at Queens Center Mall in Elmhurst, Queens. I remember some of my very first kitchen purchases quite fondly: my two tempered glass Anchor brand lasagna/casserole pans, my cheap $8 nonstick cookie sheets that lasted over 10 years, my Corelle dining set (with a design that I really dislike, but I was cheap at the time, so I got it since it was the cheapest option), and my standard sized metal 12-muffin tin.

I don’t have all those kitchen items anymore. Many I gave away, like some Corelle pieces that were duplicates of things Chris had when I moved in with him, or the smaller Anchor casserole pan that I rarely used (gifted to another friendly Buy-Nothing member!). The cookie sheets actually failed, warped, and somehow managed to snap in the oven — they literally went out with a bang — a pretty terrifying one! The muffin tin was heavily used when I lived in Elmhurst, but only sporadically since I moved to Manhattan. And then today, this 18-year-old muffin tin unfortunately saw its demise.

I got inspired to make muffins again during our recent May weekend up in the Finger Lakes/Ithaca with Chris’s parents. Along the way, we made a quick breakfast stop at this delicious, popular spot called Dottie Audrey’s Bakery + Kitchen. There, we ordered two perfectly made breakfast sandwiches, a walnut sticky bun, a sour cream coffee cake slice, and a huge, fat corn muffin stuffed with strawberry jam. While I loved everything we got from here, I will say that immediately, my first thought was that I wanted to try replicating the super crunchy corn top of the corn muffin. I loved the crunchy muffin top texture so much contrasted with the gritty, coarse, yet fluffy, not-too-sweet muffin innards. I remembered that a friend told me she used a blueberry corn muffin recipe she liked a lot from NYT Cooking, so I decided to go with that. The only swap I made was replacing half the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour for extra whole grains.

Well, I didn’t have muffin liners, so I generously oiled the muffin tin and filled them with batter, then baked it. Unfortunately, the muffins didn’t beautifully dome the way I was hoping. Instead, they kind of flattened on top of the tin, and I realized immediately that I was going to have a frustrating (and messy!) time popping these muffins out. And it was super annoying: several of them broke apart as I removed them from the tin. One almost completely disintegrated into a pile of massive crumbs, and I ended up eating the crumbs by the handful. They were tasty, but they didn’t have a beautiful dome, and they were nowhere as crunchy as Dottie Audrey’s Bakery + Kitchen.

If we didn’t have Chris’s parents over as guests (or any guests for that matter), I’d never make muffins because Chris isn’t that into them, and I can’t bring myself to eat this many muffins. And then Kaia prefers the mini ones. Muffins are kind of like dessert to me: they are a special occasion-at-home bake like cake or cookies are. We need more mouths to warrant the effort to make them. But with this, I realized that the end of this muffin tin’s life had finally arrived. So after rinsing it, I said goodbye to it as I chucked it into the recycling bin (it’s metal, so it must be recyclable, right?!).

Now, I am debating whether I want to buy a replacement regular-sized silicone muffin plan, or if I should just live with a 6-muffin silicone pan I was gifted at graduation in 2008, plus the mini muffin pan I use for Kaia’s healthy muffin treats.