brendare

andre's really good apple muffins

I'd rather be a pancake than a sneeze
In the trees,
The life of ease

I'd rather be a mushroom than a drain
In the rain,
It's rather plain

I'd rather be an elbow than a phone
All alone...

oh forget it, here are the muffins that finished off the yummiest easter dinner, taken from an email from andre:

Topping:
1/2 cups brown sugar
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1 tsp cinnamon (heap it!)
6 tbsp flour

Batter:
4 cups diced apples
1 cup milk

dry
{
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
}

wet
{
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla (heap it!)
2/3 cups vegetable oil

}

Comments about ingredients:

- Unsalted butter is supposed to have a lower moisture content. I used
to always use it, but have gotten lazy about it sometimes because I
don't usually have it around (unless I'm planning on making muffins)
and it still turns out fine.

- I think the original recipe calls for buttermilk but you can use 1-2% milk without any problems.

- Tak uses a mix of granny smith and macintosh apples. The original
recipe called for 2 cups of apples, but through experimentation, Tak
has found that 4 works well, and 6 is the maximum before the muffins
come out like apples intersperced with a bit of gooey stuff.

The oven needs to be preheated to 325 F.

First, peel, core, and dice the apples into small pieces. Perhaps the
size of small cloves of garlic. Now there's an idea - garlic muffins?

Sift the dry muffin ingredients together. At least Tak's recipe says
so. I haven't got a sifter so I just toss them into a bowl and stir it lots with a fork until everything is well mixed.

Now I turn the oven on to 325.

Get Michael to grease a muffin tin. Apparently the recipe that Tak
used claims that this makes 15 muffins. Neither of us have ever seen
a muffin tin that makes 15 so we just cram them into the 12. This can
sometimes make a little mess in the oven as the batter rises more than
the tin can hold.

For the topping, mix everything together and mash up the butter until
it's a crumbly consistency. Tak suggests softening the butter first,
then mashing with a fork. I have found that a pastry cutter is quite
suited to the task, and the butter doesn't even have to be softened at
all (and it's much faster with a pastry cutter). Just cut the butter
until there are no big lumps left.

Next, mix the wet muffin ingredients together. Once it's well mixed,
add about the quarter of the dry ingredients and stir, then add about
a quarter or the milk and stir. Repeat until everything is stirred in
and well mixed.

Add the diced apples into this mixture.

Put the batter into the muffin tin. Cover all exposed batter surface
with some topping.

Bake for about 30 minutes. Use a fork to test doneness. If sticking
a fork into a muffin and removing it leaves no gooeyness on the fork,
then you're done. If not, give it another minute or two.

Letting them cool a little makes it easier to get the them out without
them falling apart. I use a cookie sheet to cover the muffins, then I
grab both the muffin tin and the cookie sheet and flip the whole thing
over, then I can shake the muffin tin until the muffins fall out. But
don't let them sit upside down because then the crumbly topping would
get all soggy.

And as Andre said to me when he first gave me the recipe, if you make
some, can I have one? (:

Posted by brendare at April 22, 2003 12:27 PM