Samaira was a very smart girl who lived in Istanbul, Turkey. Turkey is a country in the Middle East—a very beautiful place with stunning mosques that attract many tourists.
Samaira was a young girl who loved sweets, just like Avya and Riya. She also loved to bake, making cookies, cakes, muffins, and cupcakes. But her favorite thing to make was muffins. She initially made muffins for her mummy and daddy. Mummy taught her how to make them with the right amount of cornflour, flour, eggs, and sugar. She learned how to put them in the oven so they would rise nicely. Soon, she was making many, many types of muffins—chocolate chip muffins, blueberry muffins, banana muffins, Oreo muffins, all sorts of muffins.
Her dad had a bakery shop where he sold bread and other baked goods.
One day, Samaira called her friends over to her house and made many muffins. She noticed something interesting: all her friends were very small and didn't finish their muffins. But every single one of them ate the top of the muffin and left the bottom. She also loved the top of the muffin because it's nice and crunchy. She thought, "Wow, everybody likes the top of the muffin. What should I do?"
One day, she decided to go to her daddy's shop. She had always sent muffins to the shop, but not all of them sold. This time, she took all the muffins and, with her hand, took out just the top of each muffin. She only sold the muffin tops.
She told her daddy, "Today I'm only going to sell the muffin tops." Her daddy said, "You're crazy! Nobody's going to buy just the muffin top. People want to buy the whole muffin." She said, "Let's try, Daddy."
That day, everybody bought the muffin tops! People don't want to eat a whole muffin because they feel they'll become fat. But the muffin top is only a little bit. Soon, there was a long line of people waiting to buy her muffin tops. The next day, she made more muffin tops, and people loved them.
But there was one big problem: she was taking out the bottom of the muffin—the stump—and she didn't know what to do with it. She tried to sell the bottoms separately, but nobody wanted to buy them. Who's going to buy the bottom of a muffin? Nobody likes the bottom of the muffin. Everybody only likes the top.
She couldn't sell the bottoms, and she didn't want to waste money by throwing them away. So she thought, "I'm going to make a muffin with only the top, not the bottom." She took a muffin container and filled it with something first—some plastic—and then only made the muffin top without the bottom.
But the next day, when she sold these muffin tops, nobody liked them. They weren't tasty. Why? Because you need to make the whole muffin and then take out the muffin top. Only then is it tasty. If you only make the muffin top, it's not tasty. Only the very, very top of a full muffin is delicious.
People said, "What is this? Give me my money back!" So the next day, she made the full muffins again and took out the tops, and people were happy.
She opened a parlor called the Muffin Top Bakery and eventually made five branches across the city. But she still had the problem of what to do with the muffin bottoms. Nobody wanted to eat them.
So she started giving them to charity. She found schools where poor children went who didn't get enough food to eat. She started donating the muffin bottoms for free to poor families and schools. She distributed them across the city.
Eventually, all over Istanbul and Turkey, she opened Muffin Top Bakeries, and people loved them. The trick is: you cannot just make the top. You have to make the bottom and the top, then take out the top. That's the secret to a delicious muffin top!
