Alpha Bakers -- Coffee Crumb Cake Muffins

 

When is a muffin a cupcake? When is a cake breakfast? These are existential dilemmas that expand beyond the range of your average Saturday morning blog post, and are thus out of my purview, but let it be known that when you put coffee cake in muffin tins and slip in a bit of apple, you have successfully effected the transformation to muffin. Here they are! They were delicious. 

Alpha Bakers - English Dried Fruit Cake

It has been a strange week. For the second week in a row, rain and sleet have alternated with suspiciously warm temperatures, and the emotional temperature of my city (and the whole country) has fluctuated just as much, with people out in the streets protesting the grand jury decisions in both Ferguson and Staten Island. My apartment was robbed (a comparatively minor incident, but one which left me feeling the usual degree of violated and confused), and a new baby was born in my family, seven weeks premature but already breathing on her own and beautiful. We are not fine, we are not safe, we are not cozy, and we are not alone. Upheavals and betrayals, community and joy. Heavy winds. Dear loves.

And fruitcake. This particular fruitcake is less of the classic alcohol-soaked candied fruit extravaganza, and more of a boozy apple cake with dried fruit in. With dark brown sugar, grated apples in the batter, and a rum soak after leaving the oven, it's a dark, sweet, strongly textured cake, sturdy enough to carry around all day.

I made the recipe two times, halving it both times. The first time I made it as an 8-inch cake round, and the second time as a dozen muffins. The first attempt, which was the one I carried around all day in my purse, was excellent, but slightly on the drier side (I skipped soaking the fruit because it was very soft), and would have benefited from additional syrup or rum. I was more careful the second time, soaking the dried fruit (prunes and cranberries) for the recommended time and keeping a tight eye on the baking. The resulting muffins were a perfect texture. Both times, I used cashew pieces in place of the recommended pecans, and added a handful of candied orange and lemon peel (the nice, not-harsh organic kind from the food coop). I know for some people this would negate the whole premise of a new kind of fruitcake, but I had them on hand and figured, why not? The candied fruit (in the muffin version) was actually a hit with several co-workers.

The first round was also a sleeper hit. I gave a wedge to my neighbor Pam the Cheesemonger, whom I'd helped out with a little brunch earlier in the day. Her take: "This fruit cake is so good! I don't normally get excited about this kind of thing, but this is, well, exciting." She should know, she had just showed up on my doorstep with a container of truffled mascarpone, a bottle of Cotes du Rhone, and some dried trompettes that she had foraged earlier in the year in Maine. What on earth do I do with dried trompettes?

All in all, simple and delicious. Probably not adding this one to the regular rotation but it's a handy cake to have in the repertoire.

Tuesdays with Dorie: On the Run

In the midst of all the cake, I do keep making all sorts of things from Baking: From My Home to Yours, and they often turn out to be the most popular. I've made nearly all of the recent TWD recipes, but haven't had time to blog them, and sometimes failed to get the picture. But here they are, all in a row.

Maple Cornmeal Biscuits--crunchy drops, not a lot of staying power, but no problems here.

Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones--ahead of the pack. These are more than they seem, nubbly, and nutty, and really, really, good.

Blueberry-Brown Sugar Plain Cake -- like muffins in a pyrex dish. Lovely. With rhubarb. Something about the words 'plain cake' just screams the best part of L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea.  So wholesome yet kind of not.

Caramel Pots de Creme--wonderful on the bottom, grainy on the top where the bain marie didn't quite reach. Breakfast. Seriously, why do people eat muffins for breakfast. It's all about custard.

I might skip today's chocolate biscotti, but we'll see. On we barrel, on the way to looking just like a couple of barrels. Custard ho.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Allspice Crumb Muffins

One of the great things about Tuesdays with Dorie is that it, like the book, is pleasantly inconsistent. Recipes vary from complicated to barely noticeable in terms of effort, tastes vary from rich chocolate to gentle almond or coconut. Some weeks it's three layer cake, some weeks it's streusel muffins or cup custard. Some weeks I carefully create a dessert, some weeks I off-handedly throw some things in a bowl. As long as I don't take it too seriously, TWD is endlessly adaptable to my moods, ingredient stock, and time constraints. And I don't take it too seriously--after all, my goal is a familiar and easy working familiarity with Dorie Greenspan's repertoire and style. This isn't a pastry class, and it isn't a contest. Sometimes I plate, sometimes I gobble. Sometimes I leave off toppings. But slowly and happily, my understanding of the pastry world grows and deepens, and Dorie-in-the-book and I have developed a good working relationship.

She likes cute names and creamy toppings a bit more than I do. But she also knows a lot more about the wonders of sables and pudding than I ever dreamed. And sometimes all that mascarpone really makes it. The chance to gently absorb the work of this woman who has helped the world absorb the work of so many others is always interesting.

This week was one of those stick it in the bowl, figure it will be fine, weeks. And it was. And Matt liked both these buttery beasts of Allspice Crumb Muffins and the fat-free, oat bran heavy, apple muffins from the new Moosewood cookbook equally. My streusel wasn't all that crumbly, but I attribute that to general lack of paying much attention to what I was doing, and to quartering the recipe.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Fresh Mango Muffins

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie Recipe was a sweet and simple quick bread, made with diced fresh mango, golden raisins, and plenty of spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg). My mango didn't so much dice as pulp, and I also threw in a handful of craisins for color, but otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter. The only variation was accidental--I was making a half recipe, but accidentally added the full amount of the leaveners. I scooped out what I could and just decided to see what would happen. The muffins and mini-muffins did rise aggressively, and in one of them I tasted a slight note of too-much-baking-powder bitterness, but on the whole it wasn't a disaster.

The recipe made pretty muffins, but I thought that they were overly sweet. Matt, as per usual, disagreed with me on this. He said that they were sweet but that it seemed appropriate, and was certainly no problem.

I greased the muffin pans with Bakers Joy, and while I don't usually advocate having single use aerosol sprays in the kitchen, I will admit that when I cave from time to time this one yields excellent results. I didn't have to so much as ease the muffins out with a knife, I just picked them up.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Pumpkin Muffins

I love pumpkins. I would fill the house with them if it didn't mean lugging them home from the farmer's market. Luckily, this recipe was the perfect excuse I needed to buy my very own, a ritual I observed faithfully as a child.

Again, because of the aforementioned lugging, and the fact that I'm only feeding myself this week, I substituted a nice little acorn squash for the pumpkin. It roasted quickly, and reminded me of the time I demanded Halloween in Buenos Aires, to the tune of some poorly carved butternuts.

These muffins are Dorie's take on a recipe from Sarabeth Levine, the namesake of Sarabeth's, the legendary upper West side brunch place. A version of the recipe can be found here.

I used only 5 tablespoons of butter instead of the recommended 8, and made up the difference with applesauce. With some good beating, this didn't hurt the recipe at all. I also was out of buttermilk, so I used some souring milk with a hint of lemon in. I subbed in about 1/3 of a cup of graham flour for white, and used chopped cashews instead of chopped walnuts or pecans, and dried cherries in with the raisins.

I made these in the big muffin pans, and topped them with bits of seeds from the squash, and they are delicious.

Rhubarb-Apricot Oatmeal Muffins

These have become my muffin of choice these days, as my ability to make perfect plain muffins seems to have evaporated. When I first started making muffins from any book but the Joy of Cooking, all the recipes seemed too buttery and too cakey. These Apricot Oatmeal Muffins from the Curtis & Schwartz cookbook are buttery to the point of squashy, but not too sweet, and they always look beautiful because of the way the sugar is added at the last minute. Today, I added a little rhubarb to the dried apricots. Here is my slightly tweaked version of the recipe.

Apricot Oatmeal Muffins
adapted from the Curtis & Schwartz cookbook
makes 12 muffins

Preheat oven to 400 degrees farenheit.
Poaching Mix:
# 3/4 cup dried apricots (or other fruit of your choice. dried fruits work best, if using fresh, skip the poaching and add a little lemon zest or the spices of your choice to the batterHalf an orange, cut up
# 1 cinnamon stick
# 2 whole cloves
To poach apricots, place them in a small pot with the orange, cinnamon stick, and cloves. Cover the fruit with water and simmer until they are soft but not mushy, no more than 5 minutes. Drain, cool, and chop. Discard the orange and cinnamon.

Wet Mix:

* 2 eggs
* 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
* 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
* 6 oz unsalted butter

Combine the first three wet ingredients in a bowl and stir. Let sit 15 mins to 1/2 hour. Melt the butter and add it to the wet mix. Add the chopped fruit.

Dry Mix:

* 1 3/4 cups flour (i used whole wheat pastry flour from Wild Hive)
* 2 1/4 tsp baking powder
* 3/4 tsp baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine the dry ingredients and add to the wet mix after the fruit, mixing until just combined.
Sprinkle the batter with:

* 3/4 cup brown sugar mixed with 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Gently blend the sugar mixture in, leaving streaks.
Fill a 12-cup greased muffin tin (filling cups full) and bake in the center of the oven for 20 minutes, turning halfway. Let the muffins cool in the pan for a few minutes before removing, they are very soft.