Cookbook Challenge: Week 40
Theme: Apple
Recipe: “Crunchy top” apple & pear muffins
From: Bill Granger’s Holiday
You know when you’ve been baking for a while, you start to get the jist of recipes. Most baked goods follow a similar method – for example, with many cakes you cream the butter and sugar first, and then add the dry and wet ingredients separately in a couple of batches. With muffins, you mix together the dry ingredients and then stir through the wet ingredients. After a while, once you’ve sussed out the necessary quantities of the different ingredients, you don’t really need to read the recipe. (more…)
The theme for this week’s Cookbook Challenge is “tangy”, and first up I must make a confession. I cheated this week – I actually made these muffins last week! I was going to make a fresh recipe for the theme this week, but in keeping with our long weekend tradition we did some more house painting on Good Friday (our bedroom and our ensuite). It looks fantastic, but painting seems to suck all the energy from me for the rest of the weekend and I couldn’t muster up the motivation to do anything today!
A colleague of mine gave me some rhubarb from her garden, and I used them in these muffins last weekend. I love it when people give me food – particularly when they have grown it themselves! Coincidentally, the muffins fit with the tangy theme – since they had rhubarb and yoghurt in them.
The original recipe made a large cake, but I made small cakes instead. I’m calling them muffins because the rather thick batter is mixed like a muffin rather than a cake – but the texture of them is very cake-like, similar to a butter cake. They look quite flat, but they were very good and moist. The original recipe called for a tablespoon of rose water, which I halved because I was worried that it would be too soapy. Half a tablespoon gave them a faint, sweet, fragrance that went really well with the rhubarb. I think I worried needlessly, a whole tablespoon probably would’ve been fine!
I gave a couple of muffins to my colleague, and she has promised me more rhubarb in the future. Sounds good to me!
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a 12 cup muffin tin.
In a bowl, mix together the rhubarb and sugar. Sift the flour over, and mix into the rhubarb mixture. Stir in the vanilla, egg, yoghurt, rosewater and butter until just combined (the mixture will be very thick).
Spoon the batter into the muffin trays, and decorate with the extra pieces of rhubarb. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the muffins comes out clean.
Remove from the oven and turn out on to a wire rack to cool.
The theme for the Cookbook Challenge last week was “muffins”, so I turned to the trusty AWW Bake as it has a whole chapter on muffins. Despite the entire chapter, nothing really took my fancy. Perhaps there’s still a lingering obsession with cupcakes, and muffins just seem unrefined and boring by comparison?
In Bake, there were a lot of recipes for savoury muffins, but I had already decided I wanted to make sweet ones. There were also quite a few recipes with berries and banana, neither of which I wanted to use. In the end, I finally decided on citrus poppy seed muffins. It was a pretty good choice because it’s a really easy recipe to put together. All the ingredients get thrown into an electric mixer and voila! Muffin batter! I think it took me longer to line the muffin trays with baking paper.
As you can see in the pictures, these have quite a cakey texture, unlike most other muffins. They definitely need a good amount of citrus rind – don’t skimp on the rind if you make them. It’s also far too easy to over bake them. Mine tasted okay when they were warm from the oven, but the next day they seemed a bit dry. Ahh well. It was okay when washed down with a cup of tea but I’m not sure if they’re good enough to warrant another try. So many muffins in the world, and so little time!
Preheat oven to 200°C. Grease a 12 hole muffin pan.
In an electric mixer, beat the butter, citrus rind, sugar, eggs, flour and milk until combined. Increase the speed to medium and beat until the colour of the mixture is paler. Stir in the poppyseeds and spoon the mixture into the muffin tin.
Bake for about 20 minutes or until a skewer in the middle comes out clean. Stand the muffins int he pan for 5 minutes, and then tip out on to a wire rack to cool.
Cookbook Challenge: Week 9
Theme: Berry
Recipe: Blueberry and coconut muffins From: Australian Women’s Weekly “Kitchen”
So guess what the theme is this week for the Cookbook Challenge? Berry. And guess who did berry pancakes LAST week? Yep, genius over here!
Obviously I don’t plan my weekly recipes in advance. If I had been clever, I would’ve done the pancakes this week and found a different recipe for the sweet week. But I didn’t, so I spent a bit of time this weekend looking for another berry recipe. I figured that I was going to bake something, since I didn’t fancy my chances of finding a savoury recipe that also incorporated berries.
And muffins it was! These muffins were pretty easy to put together, although the batter was extremely thick. Taste wise, they’re not a light, fluffy cake-like muffin – the coconut gives them a chewy, heavy texture that is vaguely similar to a scone. I’m not really selling them, I know, but let me tell you that they are strangely moreish. I ate one, and another, and another…. I hate to tell you how many I ate today (FOUR, for goodness sake).
Preheat the oven to 200°C and grease or line a 12 hole muffin tin.
In a food processor, pulse the chopped butter and caster sugar until it resembles large breadcrumbs.
Sift the flours into a large bowl (add in any stuff from the wholemeal flour that couldn’t make it through the sieve), and add the butter mixture. Add the buttermilk, egg, desiccated coconut and blueberries. Mix until just combined.
Spoon the mixture into the muffin tin holes and bake for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer in the centre comes out come. Stand the muffins in the tin for five minutes, and then remove on to a wire rack to cool.
Hooray for long weekends! I spent the bulk of it cooking – it was nice to get back in the kitchen and be enthused and excited again.
On Saturday we went to visit my dear friend Emily, her partner Mark and their lovely wee girl Audrey. Em and Mark bought their first house recently and moved in about 6 weeks ago. I was keen to see their new place, but as Em is rather pregnant at the moment (she’s due next week!) I offered to cook them dinner in exchange for a nosey beak and a play with Audrey. Win win situation!
What to cook, what to cook? I’ve never been of the mindset that, when cooking for friends, you should only use recipes that you have made before. If you can’t experiment on your friends, what’s the point? (That, and I have enough faith in my cooking skills now that I reckon I could salvage a dish even if the recipe was crap.) I spent a fair bit of time browsing my cookbooks and the internet and settled on a chicken and date stew from taste.com.au. (I did take a photo, but it didn’t look terribly appetising so I won’t bother posting it.)
The dish turned out great – it had lots of flavour from all the spices and the dates added a final bit of sweetness. I’ve said before that I’m not sure about fruit in savoury dishes, but perhaps I’m warming to it. I served it with cous cous that had sultanas and pepitas stirred in. It was nice to have the bits of crunchy pepita and almonds as a textural difference.
And dessert, of course I made dessert! Dessert was chocolate and pear muffins with chocolate syrup (recipe also from taste.com.au). They look like it took a fair amount of effort to make, but they were actually quite simple to put together. Though I did almost forget to add the eggs… I might have a different opinion if I hadn’t reread the recipe just in time! The muffins were quite dense and rich, with the pear in the middle helping to break up the chocolate. They look gorgeous and are worth making, I reckon.
I’ve been on the look out for baking recipes that aren’t too sweet to eat at morning tea. The recipe for these maple bran muffins appealed because the recipe doesn’t contain sugar (but it does have 4 tablespoons of maple syrup). The original recipe asked for pecans, and instead I substituted with dried apricots. I thought that the dried apricots worked well, as they gave a bit of fruity sweetness to the nuttiness of the bran. I tried another batch using banana – and this was a big FAIL. I know that I liked the recipe because I didn’t want something that was too sweet, but the banana batch just wasn’t sweet enough. They were just too damn healthy tasting!
Old-fashioned maple bran muffins Adapted from Linda Collister’s Quick Breads
Makes 12 medium muffins
225g sour cream 125ml milk 75g wheat bran 35g wheat germ 1 large egg, beaten 4 tablespoons maple syrup 125g plain white flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda a pinch of salt 100g dried apricots, chopped into small pieces (or 100g chopped pecans) a little demerara or coarse sugar for sprinkling
In a large bowl combine the sour cream with the milk, then stir in the wheat bran and wheat germ and leave to soak for 30 minutes.
Heat the oven to 180°C.
Stir in the egg and maple syrup into the sour cream mixture. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt on to the mixture and mix in. Stir in the apricots
Spoon the mixture into muffin moulds. Sprinkle each muffin with a little sugar and then bake for about 25 minutes until firm to the touch.
Turn out on to a wire cooling rack. Eat the same day while still warm, or the next day gently reheated. Can be frozen for up to a month.
I like the humble carrot. I wouldn’t say that it’s my favourite vegetable, but it’s certainly one of the most useful. I put it in almost everything – pasta sauces, soups, stews, stir fry, sandwiches, roasts and salads as well as eating it raw by itself or with dips.
Carrot juice is probably my favourite juice, although I don’t drink it often due to the amount of carrots needed to make a cup (plus I don’t have a juicer). And carrot cake? Carrot cake has got to be one of the best cakes ever. Foodtimeline says that carrot cake was most likely descended from Medieval carrot puddings, where they were used due to the natural sweetness (because sweetners were expensive). Carrot cake was around here and there since that time, and recipes for cakes with a cream cheese icing started to appear in the 1960s.
This recipe was adapted from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. The original recipe called for plain white flour and walnuts. I used wholemeal flour instead, because one of my favourite things about carrot cake is the nuttiness. Because I don’t like walnuts and therefore never have any in the pantry, I substituted pepitas.
I made muffins instead of a big cake and ate them over a few days – they were a great mid-morning snack.
Simple carrot cake
Adapted from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion
125 g self-raising wholemeal flour 3/4 cup brown sugar 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 2/3 cup olive oil 2 eggs, lightly beaten 2 cups finely grated carrot 60 g roughly chopped walnuts or pepitas
Preheat oven to 180 degree C and grese an 18 cm springform tin or 6 cup muffin tin. Mix flour, sugar and spices. Add oil and eggs and beat in a food processor or an electric mixer for 1 minute. Stir in carrot and walnuts/pepitas. Spoon into prepared tin and bake for about 1 hour (less if making muffins). Cool in tin before turning out.
When cold, dust with icing sugar mixed with ground cinnamon or ice with cream cheese mixed with a touch of icing sugar and lemon juice.
I had an urge to bake last week, and ended up with these muffins after a lot of flipping through cookbooks and browsing the internets. They could be the best muffins EVER. Sweet, moist, nutty, fragrant with coconut and with the occasional tangy raspberry – they were such a treat. Chocolate is so overrated – give me these any day!
1. Combine coconut and coconut cream in a large bowl. Cover and stand for 30 minutes. 2. Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease a 12 cup muffin tin or line with muffin cases. 3. Using a metal spoon, stir sugar, egg and vanilla into coconut mixture. Gently stir in the flour until combined. Fold in raspberries. 4. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin tins and put a raspberry on top of each one. Top with shredded coconut if desired. Bake for 20-30 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool muffins in pan for 10 minutes. Lift onto a wire rack to cool completely.
