Upside-Down Pear

This morning, I went looking for coffee cake recipes. I found one that at first glance, looked interesting, but on a deeper read…well, I thought it would be pretty dreadful. I was too lazy to look up more, though, so instead I altered it on the fly into some tasty muffins.

Spicy Winter Muffins

dry ingredients
2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 c crystallized ginger
1/2 c diced dried apricots
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder

wet ingredients
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk or clabbered milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix by muffin method.

Bake in greased muffin tin, 20-22 minutes for regular muffins, 25-28 minutes for large muffins, or until a knife stuck in the middle of a muffin comes out clean.

Yield: 12 regular muffins, or 6 large muffins.

The “muffin method” is very simple: mix dry ingredients together in one bowl. Mix wet ingredients together in another. Add wet to dry and stir until just combined. (Yes, this will be lumpy.)

That’s all. If you do this properly, you will never know the sadness of a tough chewy muffin. Instead, all your muffins will be tender and delicious.

These particular muffins are true to their coffee cake heritage, and are scandalously delicious split and buttered, with a mug of joe on the side.

I’ve never been a big fan of complicated muffins. Muffins ought to be simple things — but they should never be boring. The other day, I was looking for something to use up some oat flour I’d ground (steel-cut oats + KitchenAid grain mill attachment = love), and found a bunch of horridly boring-looking “healthy” muffin recipes, along with a stray OK-looking recipe that called for rolled oats. I knew Is My Blog Burning 13, on muffins and cupcakes, was coming up, so I saved the recipe for later experimentation.

Rumor has it, by the by, that cooking is an art, but baking is a science. This is codswallop. Baking is an art — with constraints. You can change a recipe to hell and back if you know what you are doing, and muffins are an easy place to learn that kind of thing. They’re more forgiving than cake and bread, and usually you can feed even failures to hungry teenagers or coworkers without embarrassment.

Last night, I set about changing the recipe:

Banana Breakfast Muffins

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup oat flour
1/4 cup ground teff berries (or teff flour, or graham flour - teff is an eensy weensy African grain and may not be easy to find. I get mine from my local Whole Foods.)
1/2 cup minus 2 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder (sift so there are no lumps)
1 teaspoon baking soda (sift so there are no lumps)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 very ripe banana, mostly mashed (it should still have lumps)

Combine flours, sugars, baking powder, soda, and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat together the egg, milk, oil, vanilla, and mashed banana.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Stir until just combined.

Oil a muffin tin and fill the cups about 2/3 full of batter. Bake at 400 degrees F (205 degrees C) for 22-27 minutes. (My muffin tin makes big muffins, so this recipe yields 6 muffins, and is timed for that. This can easily make 12 small muffins, but reduce the cooking time to 18-20 minutes.) Muffins are done when a clean knife inserted in the center comes out damp, but not covered in sticky batter.

The ground teff berries give these muffins a slightly nutty taste with no nuts, and a pleasantly speckled interior; the not-quite-mashed banana leaves hidden pockets of banana goodness for your tastebuds to find. Switching the rolled oats out for oat flour means no surprise dry rolled oats (bleh!), and a more tender crumb. As for the brown sugar - well, I’ve just never liked all-white-sugar baked goods; they taste thin to me. In this case, the little bit of brown sugar plays nicely with the teff for a slightly deeper flavor than the muffins would’ve had otherwise.

Unlike so many bland “healthy” muffins, these need no butter to taste delicious. They can stand up to a mug of black coffee, but aren’t too sweet to munch alongside a glass of orange juice. I won’t pretend they’re particularly good for you — but they are a damn fine breakfast all the same.

I know so many people with holiday traditions of cookies by the hundreds, cookies of all shapes and sizes and flavors. My mother-in-law makes so many cookies in December that she could feed a small nation.

My holiday cookie traditions are more limited. The main one — often the only one — was chrusciki, a Polish cookie also known as “angel wings”. The dough is rolled out and cut into strips, and if you are making them properly, you cut a slit in the strip and twist the dough in on itself to make, well, angel wings. Mom never bothered, and neither would you if you were frying enough chrusciki to fill a whisky barrel. So her chrusciki were always a rough and tumble kind of cookie, browned at the edges, irregular sizes, broken where they jostled each other in the tins and baskets she kept them in.

It didn’t matter. They tasted like heaven, and no one else around us had them. They were special to us, like the homemade kielbasa hung in the cold porch, so different from the store-bought item. As teenagers, my brothers could eat a large roasting pan full of chrusciki and come back for more; the first few years living away from home, I hoarded my little tin until the few remaining cookies were too stale to eat.

I’ve still never made them myself, alone. It’s still something I want from Mom.

Tonight, I tweaked some recipes around and made chocolate thumbprint cookies with candied cherry centers. They’re gorgeous: sleek and uniform, soft brown and gleaming red. They’re delicious and cheery and look like a million other cookies on a million other tables, not like those tumbled chrusciki of memory, the only chrusciki in the neighborhood, rare and precious as angel wings fallen to earth.

I’ve had a devil of a time making brownies. In the last seven years, I’ve made many different recipes - including my mother’s trusty old one that I used as a child - and each time turned up brownies that were goopy in the middle and shatteringly brittle on top. Many people offered up opinions - wrong method, wrong pan, wrong oven - but nothing I changed seemed to make any difference.

Until last night, when - struck by a brownie craving - I found a recipe for Irish cream brownies. Studying the recipe, I noticed a few things clearly wrong with the method - things left out. Right. Well, I can fix that - and I stopped and wondered for a moment if my casual attitude towards recipes was going to get me into trouble. I decided it wasn’t, and proceeded.

The first, most obvious thing wrong - the eggs need to be beaten together with the vanilla before you try to incorporate them. Secondly, they need to be tempered before they are added to the hot mixture. That hardly even counts as recipe tampering, to my mind; it’s more like the person who wrote the thing down forgot something so basic and obvious. But it’s not obvious to everyone, and leaving steps like that out can result in tragedy.

I didn’t have a 10×15x1 pan, so I used my elderly 9.5×13.5×2, and increased the baking time to 25 minutes. When the brownies came out, they were soft and dark brown; I brushed the Irish cream over them and watched them turn glossy and nearly black. I rather felt that the glaze the recipe calls for would be gilding the lily, so instead I let them cool and ate some plain. They were delicately-textured, cakey but not sticky, with a tender crumb and a faint Irish cream scent.

Finally, I had conquered the elusive brownie! I did a dance of victory and had another…

I wrote yesterday about garam masala, and my potentially out-of-hand addiction to it. These chocolate garam masala cookies taste a bit like Oreos, with a faint spiciness at the back of the flavor.

Based on a recipe from Gourmet, Feb. 2003

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/4 tsp garam masala
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
6 oz. chocolate chips (1/2 bag)

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, cocoa, garam masala, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl.

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, then beat in eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips. Add flour mixture and mix just until combined - do not overmix!

Drop tablespoons of dough onto ungreased baking sheets and bake about 12 minutes. Because they’re so dark, you will have to keep an eye on them - they will puff up a bit, and shouldn’t collapse under your finger if you open up the oven and touch them lightly. Cool on a rack.