muffin break

Time to interrupt this travel story with some good old-fashioned baking.

Last night, haunted by two black bananas sitting in the fruit bowl, I whipped up a batch of muffins. The banana muffin base recipe has never failed me yet, in fact each tray of muffins just keeps getting better.

I’m continuing to tweak the recipe and experiment with new flavours. The latest version was plump and moist and though I say it each time – the best ones I’ve made so far.

As they take only 5 minutes to put together and just 20 minutes to bake, it’s easy to throw together some muffins while cleaning up after dinner.

The hard part is trying to resist scoffing the whole lot of them and leaving no treats for lunch the next day!

Cherry, chocolate and nutmeg muffins

Preheat oven to 175C. Line or grease your muffin pans.

Wet Ingredients
30 gm butter, melted
2/3 cup golden syrup
Nutmeg, a few swipes with a fine grater
1/2 cup dried cherries

Melt the butter on low. Take off the heat and add golden syrup. Stir til dissolved. Add the nutmeg and cherries to macerate in the buttery-syrupy liquid while measuring the dry ingredients.

When cool add:
2 bananas, mashed
1 egg, beaten

Dry ingredients
3/4 cup walnuts
1.5 cups plain flour
1 level tsp baking powder
1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
Pinch of salt

Bash the walnuts in a mortar and pestle or chop with a sharp knife, not too fine as you want them a bit chunky. Combine in a large bowl with the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt.

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Stir til combined but don’t overwork the batter.

Now crumble a few big squares of your favourite dark chocolate into the mix with your final stir.

Spoon batter into the pans and bake for 20 minutes.

Check with a skewer to see that the muffins are cooked.

Remove from the pans and allow to cool (or at least try to resist scoffing the whole lot in one sitting).

ginger muffins

With my barely clean hand I manage to push the open laptop further across the table, just in the nick of time as a sprinkling of flour covers the surface with snow-like drifts.

The entire room looks apocalyptic with abandoned pots dripping with butter and shiny silver bowls smeared with wet and dried ingredients.

It’s a sure sign I’ve been baking!

I got an urge to make a cake. In particular, my mother's ginger cake – dark, dense, moist and spicy. Somewhere along the way this became muffins, still flavoured with ginger but quite a deviation from my starting point. In between I had consulted another lovely cake recipe in The Cook’s Companion and added an extra spice to my list of ingredients.

The muffins are a work in progress, I had intended to have another play with the recipe before posting but life has got in the way. I’m thinking of trying different flours next time (a touch of buckwheat perhaps as the flavours are robust enough, maybe add another egg to compensate for any heaviness?) and keep adjusting the spices.

Recipe notes:

Fresh, rather than dried or crystallised ginger, is a major modification to the recipe. Having found no powdered ginger in the house I decided to microplane fresh root to get the juice and just a little of the finely grated flesh. I used to have a Japanese ginger grater that is perfect for the job but the fine grater over a small bowl worked just fine. Use the youngest, plump ginger root you can find otherwise juicing it will be akin to getting blood out of a stone! Taste the wet ingredients while adding the juice to get the right level of ginger for your palate.

The white pepper was courtesy of one of Stephanie Alexander’s recipes. I crushed the whole spices and also the walnuts in a mortar and pestle.

The muffin recipe template is another adaptation of Catherine’s recipe that I first explored in my post on cherry, banana, walnut and nutmeg muffins

Ginger muffins

Heat oven to 175 c.

Wet ingredients

30 gm melted butter
1/2 cup golden syrup (more if you are a sweet tooth)
3 ripe bananas, mashed
Juice of approx 3 cm of fresh ginger finely grated (to taste)
1 egg, beaten

Allow the butter to cool before combining the ingredients.

Dry ingredients

2-3 white peppercorns, ground
4 cloves, ground
1/2 tsp cinnamon powder
2/3 cup of walnuts (measured before crushing), crushed
1.5 cups of flour 1 level tsp bicarb soda/baking soda
1 level tsp baking powder
Scant 1/2 tsp sea salt

Combine the dry ingredients.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and stir, just a little, don’t over work it.

Spoon into greased muffin tins.

Cook for 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack.

These muffins taste even better the next day but it is very hard to leave them that long!

muffin time

I’d forgotten how easy it is to make muffins. A bowl of wet ingredients, another of dry – mix together and bake.

Simple.

I almost followed a recipe, just improvised a little along the way.

Of course when I compare what I made to the original – the methodology is the same, the ingredients improvised and quantities are a little fuzzy. Strangely, at the time I was making the muffins I was sure I was following it to the T.

So I’ll make it easy. If you haven’t got your own favourite banana muffin recipe, then follow Catherine’s. I figure that if over 250 people have commented on it, the majority having happily used the recipe themselves, you couldn’t go wrong.

But if you want to walk on the wild side, then follow my version.

Banana muffins with cherries, walnuts and nutmeg

Turn the oven onto 175 c

Wet ingredients

30 g melted butter
1/3 cup (or more) maple syrup
2 large ripe bananas, mashed (more if you’ve got them)
1 egg, lightly beaten

Combine the above ingredients, letting the melted butter cool down before mixing it with the beaten egg.

Dry ingredients

A large handful of dried cherries (I found some in the pantry clean out and thought – why not?)
A large handful of walnuts
1.5 cups of flour – I used a mixture of 3/4 wholemeal and 1/4 rice flour (why? Because they were there)
1 level tsp bicarb soda/baking soda
1 level tsp baking powder
Scant 1/2 tsp sea salt
A generous pinch freshly ground nutmeg (it was about 1/4 of a small nutmeg)

Chop the dried fruit and nuts. Combine the flours and other powdery things in a bowl. Toss the fruit and nuts through it til they are coated in flour.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and stir, just a little, don’t over work it.

Spoon into greased muffin tins.

Cook for 20 minutes.

Cool on a wire rack.



YUM!

UPDATE: Have made a few tweaks and this version of the cherry muffins is even better!