"...fill the batter in a greased muffin sheet..."

I've been very much craving to make some muffins recently, so I finally found an appealing recipe on the Recipe Browser. Pretty well every recipe says to pour the batter into a greased baking sheet...understandably, to prevent sticking.

My question is, if I took some Canola oil on a paper towel, or a stick of butter, and buttered up my muffin tray, should I count the calories? Do those even count as calories in the food? And would my 0 Calorie Mazola Spray do the trick?

I know I could use muffin inserts, but I hate using the paper thingys. I just like having the muffin slip out

Advice from pros and beginners like me is appreciated

It's very minimal at best....a tsp of butter on some waxed paper would be enough to do a few dozen muffin inserts. The calorie count broken down per muffins is pretty much nothing. And unless you weight everything out and pour exactly the same amount of batter per insert, you'll never have an exact calorie count per muffin anyway.....0 calorie corn oil (mazola) has calories just not at 3/100th's of a second for a serving..........gotta love what constitutes a serving these days........

I agree with neanderthin - oil is oil, and all oils have the same calories: 120 per tablespoon. The only reason they can call it 0 calorie is because of the tiny serving size they suggest. If I used as little butter as the serving size, I could also call it "0 calorie".

Neither corn oil or canola oil are great for your health; the best option is actually butter.

All calories you use/eat "count", but you won't need much butter so it won't affect the total much at all.

Sorry, I guess I didnt phrase my question properly...I know that those "0 Calories sprays" have calories, and I usually count it like Pam - 2 cals per 0.5 second spray, approximately.

My question is WHAT should I use to grease my sheet (got the answer, butter - but for convenience sake, would the spray suffice?) and HOW should I count it? Like if I take a stick of butter and just rub it against the sheet? How much would that be? Tbsp? More/less?

You can use cooking spray - it works fine. Buttering the pan is more important for big things - if you were going to make a layer cake and wanted to make sure you got the layers out cleanly, spreading butter on with wax paper works bettter, but cooking spray is great for muffin trays.

If you did use butter, I might start with a tablespoon (so you know what quantity you started with), rub the wax paper against the tablespoon (you probably won't pick up the whole tablespoon all at once), spread it in the muffin tins, go back to the butter, etc. If you ran through your first tablespoon before greasing the whole tray, you could cut yourself another piece, but I think you could easily do a whole 12-muffin tray with less than 1 Tbs.

How do you count a 1/2 second spray anyway? Does anyone actually use a stopwatch? lol

On my Pam bottle it says that a 1 second spray is 7 calories. The serving size is 1/3 of a spray, which would be 2.3 calories, so a 1/2 second spray would be more like 3.5 calories and not 2. Not that it's a big deal, I just get annoyed with their way of labeling things. ARR.

Anyway, I also wanted to contribute my way of doing things like muffins and cakes. This is only if you want to be really anal about how many calories you're eating. First I weigh the pan that they will be baked in. I write it down so I don't forget. After measuring out and mixing the ingredients together, I pour them into the pan and bake 'em. When they're done, I take them out and let them cool. Then I reweigh the entire thing, pan and all, and subtract the weight of the pan from the final total. Then I divide it by servings. For example:

Weight of Pan = 3 oz.
Total After Baking = 12 oz.
Total weight of food = 9 oz.

Calories in entire recipe = 700
Serving size = 6
Calories per serving = about 116

9 oz. divided by 6 = 1.5 oz. per serving

And since serving sizes may vary, you just weigh whatever it is. So that way if like a muffin weighs 2.5 oz. cuz it had more batter in the cup, you'd know that particular one has more like 193 calories.

If all calories are only an approximation anyways, why worry about if you use 1/2 second spray or 1 full second spray.  This is just getting to anal for me.