How about the cost of the pens the President signs everything with??? One letter of his name for each pen. You know that they probably pay over $100 for each of them. Just so some senator or legislator can say they have a pen the president used. Really makes you mad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hard to imagine how to make a $16 muffin. I have to say the most expensive cake I bake is probably Hummingbird cake. What with bananas, crushed pineapple, and pecans and cream cheese it adds up when I go to buy the ingredients. That is on top of the butter, eggs flour, sugar and confectionary sugar that also goes into it. Even if I made it into those big giant muffins though they wouldn't cost $16 each. Maybe lobster muffins with cheddar and brie might cost a lot but nothing really can cost 16 bucks unless you are paying a huge amount for labor or shipping costs...like sending the muffins to Alaska or Hawaii or something!
Joann

I could easily make $16 muffins. I would use my basic corn meal muffin recipe....with real butter of course and stone ground organic cornmeal....but I would add the ingredients with a 1/4 teaspoon measure and charge $30 an hour for my time.
It's not the ingredients that cost, but the labor to make the muffins....and the labor to pack them up and likely the doily they sit upon.
Linda C

Here's some more ideas as to how to get the cost of the humble muffin up to $16. Just add some of these as ingredients to the muffin!

Here is a link that might be useful: Most expensive foods in the world

If labour costs were such a big component, how can muffin shops sell their muffins at considerably less than $16 each?

It's not labor or ingredients. The people selling the muffins accurately gauged the amount of care the Justice Department would take in spending our tax money -- in this case, none at all.

The main ingredient is OPM (sounds like "opium"), which stands for Other People's Money. The abuse of OPM seems to come with everyone from the local dog catcher to the upper levels of government when it's not their money they spend.

But to be fair, contracts for the cost of meeting rooms are seemingly low and attractive to get your business, and the establishment off-sets that by the outrageous prices charged for the food/beverages for the meetings. Those charges seem to have little-to-nothing to do with actual costs for the food/beverages.

-Grainlady

Hey, it is quite misleading to think this is a government waste issue. I worked at planning a major national conference last year, and our local convention centre charged $6.95 per cup of ordinary brewed coffee for coffee breaks (water was only $3.50 per glass). That is the price for everyone, whether the client is government, private industry, or a non-profit like my organization.

Anyway, we decided to pass on coffee breaks altogether, before we even inquired about the cost of muffins....

$16? Considering that muffins at a mediocre restaurant cost $4-$5, I'm not all that impressed with $16 for what likely would be a much more expensive place than a Perkins or Dennys.

As a banker who's been responsible for overseeing many "in default" resorts/hotels I know that also included in the $16 is often the labor costs for wait staff, table arrangements, serve ware, floral arrangements, etc. In some cases, even the cost of room rental is calculated into the food cost.

It makes flashy headlines though to get folks riled up about "government waste".

/tricia

I wasn't trying to make this political. I just thought it would be fun to figure out what you would put in a muffin to make it actually cost $16.

Maybe I should have asked, "What would your dream ingredient(s) be to put in a muffin if budget was no object?"

The $16 is a misleading number, that sells newspapers.

If you get the meeting space and services free in return for using the hotel's food service, that makes for a $16 muffin. But you don't get the readership from a headline that says "government uses free meeting space".

Remember that contrived cost accounting can spit out almost any number you want it to.

We ran into that. Our parent company provides our back office and tech services. Their cost accounting indicated that the cost of processing paychecks, doing benefits paperwork, and IT for just 7 people occupying about 5K sq ft in Portland was something like $1 million a year. Because they took all the overhead of their entire back office, HR, IT, legal, accounting, etc operations all over the country - and divided it over the persons in particular job categories. Naturally, we made sure the relevant agreements limited the costs allocated to our business to a certain $ figure.

Now, in the spirit of the OP, I will say - how about a big muffin stuffed with caviar, with tons of saffron and, oh, sea urchin in the dough? I think you could get to $50 in food cost per muffin pretty quickly. It would be inedible, but I'd try my best.

Ewww, John, now that sounds disgusting.

I think the closest I ever came to a $16 muffin was when I almost bought a bottle of cardamom at The Evil Empire/Walmart for somewhere around $10 to make Sol's Dirt Bombs. I came here and ranted about how I was no way going to make a $10 batch of muffins and several people sent me cardamom, both ground and in pods.

Shortly after that I found that I could get a bottle of cardamom at Penzey's for about $2. Yeah.....

Anyway, maybe a savory muffin with serrano ham and really good expensive parmagiano reggiano, maybe a grating of truffles?

Annie

Tanks Annie & John & Joann. I think those create juices are staring to flow. I've never had sea urchin. That's one I would have never thought of.

Joann, I like the idea of brie & lobster.
Annie, being Eastern European, ham goes with everything! I like the idea of truffles and a really good parm too!

The DOJ's OIG (Office of Inspector General) Tuesday released an audit showing that the department spent nearly $500,000 for food and beverages at just 10 Justice-sponsored conferences in 2008 and 2009.

Or, a $50,000 catering bill for each conference. (I wonder how many attendees per $50k?) And at 2008-2009 prices for food!

So, folks, you really need to adjust that $16 muffin for food inflation to get a true reflection of how much it would cost in 2011 food dollars. Just guessing, probably something more on the order of a $20 muffin.

If anyone's interested, here's Hilton Worldwide (where the meeting was held)'s response to what's included with the $16 muffin.

Here is a link that might be useful: $16 Muffin? No, says Hilton