CHOCOLATE DOESN’T BELONG IN MUFFINS? TRY THESE BANANA CHOCO/CHIP DELIGHTS!

That would be me—the lady who says that chocolate has no business floating around in muffins (which I have mostly considered to be breakfast or coffee-break/teatime fare). If you’re a Baby Boomer like me, you might recall the old Bill Cosby routine wherein Cosby is making breakfast for his kids and they want chocolate cake, so that’s what he’s gonna give ’em! Our son Adrian loved that skit (might even have heard it live at the Proctor’s when we took him to see the comedian perform – can’t recall which routines included in the act!), What made it funny was the fact that, two or three decades ago, no one considered chocolate as appropriate on any kind of early morning menu. Who but a father who was not used to pulling together a real meal would even consider dishing it out to his kids? I tend to think chocolate started to sneak into the rise ‘n’ shine food group with the intro by Dunkin’ Donuts’ of their Boston Cream filled donuts. Even I wasn’t immune to those…

But getting back to my kitchen, where three bananas dangled from the “banana hook” on my kitchen counter, already more ripe than I prefer unless mixed into something bake-worthy. And I wanted to make just one more thing to bring to that chili/bake sale at Kristen’s workplace. So I scanned the dessert/baking cookbook shelves and wound up pulling down the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts by the Moosewood Collective (Clarkson Potter Publishers/Random House, 1997), probably because I have a special love for Moosewood, which I’ve written about on this blog. (I’m not the only Moosewood lover either. Check out a seven-page article, “40 Years of Moosewood!” by Jamie Stringfellow in the November/December 2012 issue of Spirituality & Health magazine, in which it is noted that Bon Appétit named the restaurant as “one of the 13 most influential restaurants of the 20th century.”)

In the long run, the muffins I created changed out or added something like six or seven new or slightly revised ingredients, so it’s not their recipe at all. It was the inspiration that I needed, however, and it worked. If you need a run-through of differences: butter instead of oil; added yogurt; split brown sugar between light and dark; reduced flour amount and added almond meal; added cinnamon; cut vanilla extract in half to add in almond extract; added mini-chocolate chips.

These were heavenly. Bill and I split one. One was packed into the thermal bag with Kristen’s chili & cornbread lunch & cookies (necessary because, otherwise, she is so busy with aspects of the sale/raffle, sometimes all the food is sold before she gets any lunch!). That left eight for the sale. Don’t know who bought them, but I’d be willing to bet they didn’t last long!

MARILYN’S BANANA CHOCO-CHIP MUFFINS
Yields 10 large Muffins

Ingredients

• ½ cup butter, softened
• 2½ tablespoons plain Greek yogurt (I used 2%)
• 1 cup brown sugar (I used a combo of light & dark brown sugars)
• 2 eggs
• 3 large ripe bananas, mashed
• 1½ cup unbleached all purpose flour
• ¾ cup almond meal
• 1 teaspoon Roasted Saigon cinnamon (plain ol’ cinnamon will work too)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt (table salt or fine-ground sea salt)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• ½ to ¾ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips

Process

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Grease jumbo muffin tin or insert paper liners.
3. In a large bowl, beat butter, yogurt, sugar, eggs and bananas until well blended.
4. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, almond meal, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt. (If tiniest bit of almond meal doesn’t go through sifter – we’re talking something like no more than “a pinch” – it’s okay to turn sifter over and dump into bowl.)
5. Fold dry ingredients into wet, using quick strokes and being careful not to overmix.
6. Gently stir in extracts.
7. Fold in chocolate chips.
8. Spoon batter into prepared muffin tin.
9. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until cake tester or butter knife comes out clean when inserted into muffin.
10. Turn muffins out of tin within first five minutes of removal from oven. Cool on a rack.

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR LEFTOVER MUFFINS & CUPCAKES

Got a couple muffins or cupcakes that are just a bit past their prime? Not likely anyone will opt to devour them in this condition? Here’s a terrific idea, gleaned from The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove by Cathy Erway (Gotham Books, 2010).

Erway’s book, inspired by her blog, tracks her journey through what she’d determined would be a year of NOT eating in restaurants in New York City – which, when done as often as most New Yorkers do, is expensive as well as not necessarily good for either the body or the environment. It’s an engrossing book that not only chronicles her cooking and baking endeavors (with recipes) but also her adventures while exploring underground supper clubs, local cook-offs and even a few experiences with “trash diving, freegans and frualistas.” Her recipe for “Almond Custard Tarts with Leftover Muffin Crust” inspired the recipe below, hurriedly drafted as I am in the middle of packing to attend the Women Writers and Artists Matrix (WWAM) Weekend in Saratoga Springs this weekend. I wanted to get another post onto KitchenCauldron before I take off!

These are incredibly easy to make. And it was the perfect use for the leftover gluten-free almond cupcakes I’d made for the WomanWords Reading at Caffè Lena. G-free baked goods are notoriously drier the next day (although mine were more moist than most), plus these had ground nuts in them. What more could I ask for in a tart crust? (Oh yeah, I was going to assume that readers would realize they’d not be using any frosting that was on a cupcake – but then we know why one shouldn’t ASSume, right? Such assumption would make of me what the first part of that word spells out!)

The few changes I made to Erway’s recipe are noted within the recipe. I also gave the option of simply using a “cook & serve” boxed pudding, if you’re really short on time or prefer not to do custard from scratch.

Bill loved these tarts, as did I. And they’re so simple to make, yet look so fancy-schmancy!

I know I have one more cupcake recipe to post from the WomanWords 15-Year Birthday Reading, but that will wait until next week. It’s for the most popular of the cupcakes that night too – a super-rich vanilla cupcake. And then there will be the Squash & Sweet Potato Soup that I’ll want to tell you about—there’s a potluck at the home of one of the WWAM founders tomorrow night, and I made it in the slowcooker! All I have to do is remember to bring the camera and to actually take a few snapshots of the evening’s feast!

May you all have as creative a weekend as I am expecting to enjoy!

ALMOND (OR VANILLA) CUSTARD TARTS FROM GOING-STALE MUFFINS/CUPCAKES
Yields 4 tarts

CRUST:

Ingredients

• 1 or 2 leftover muffins or cupcakes (the “heavier” texture of muffins make them the best candidates for these tarts, but use the latter if crumbs are truly stale, especially if there are nuts in them!)
• 1 tablespoon water (you could use melted butter instead, which I did, but not necessary)

Process

1. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
2. In a bowl, crumble your muffin or cupcake by hand.
3. Add the water (or butter) and combine with a spatula. Mixture should be moist but you don’t want it to stick together in a ball.
4. Press the mixture with your hands or a spatula firmly into the sides of four ramekins.
5. Place the ramekins on a baking tray and bake for 10 to 15 minutes.
6. Remove to a wire rack and cool completely before filling.

CUSTARD (two options):

Option #1 Ingredients

• ½ cup sugar
• 2 cups whole milk (I don’t stock whole milk so I combined 1¼ cup 2% and ¾ cup heavy cream)
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon almond or vanilla extract
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• Fresh berries for topping (optional) – I had only frozen strawberries, which don’t look as pretty but they sure tasted good!

Option #1 Process

1. Whisk sugar, milk, extract and nutmeg together in a saucepan.
2. Scald the mixture by bringing it to a boil. Then turn off the heat (if you have an electric stove, make sure you remove it from the burner or hot cooktop area!)
3. In another bowl, lightly beat the egg yolks.
4. While stirring, add a small amount (about a teaspoonful) of the heated milk mixture (this is called tempering, which should ensure the eggs don’t begin to cook when adding hot liquid).
5. Gradually add a few more teaspoons of milk mix. Mixture should be smooth, not lumpy.
6. When you’ve added about ½ cup of the milk mixture, pour the egg mix into the milk one.
7. Cook over medium heat, stirring once in a while, until the custard has thickened to where it coats the back of a spoon dipped into it.
8. Pour custard into the baked tart shells.
9. Sprinkle with a little more nutmeg.
10. Chill in refrigerator until set, about 3 to 4 hours.
11. Serve with berries atop, if using.

Option #2 Ingredients

• 1 box “cook & serve” vanilla pudding (strongly advised not to use “instant” pudding – it’s just terrible)
• ½ teaspoon of almond extract (if you want to add a bit of almond flavor to vanilla)
• Up to ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
• Berries, as noted above in Option #1

Option #2 Process

1. Cook pudding according to directions on the box, adding extract (if using) and nutmeg.
2. Chill for amount of time directed on box.
3. Serve with berries atop, if using.

GLUTEN-FREE ALMOND CUPCAKES: Taking on the Challenge of Gluten-Free Baking

ADDED NOTE TO THIS BLOGPOST (5/25/12): After one reader with a corn allergy added a comment to this post, I’ve now deleted the “No-Corn-Products” part of the above title – first doing a little research, of course. According to what I’ve found out, Namaste may be the only company which manufactures and sells a corn-free xanthan gum. Unfortunately, I was using Bob’s Red Mill, which is gluten-free but not corn-free. As for the almond extract, I e-mailed McCormick’s twice. The first time I got the usual stuff about its being g-free but then I wrote again saying I knew that already and that I needed to know if their choice of alcohol in the extract was produced without corn. Their Consumer Affairs Specialist replied that “The natural alcohol used in McCormick Extracts is derived from corn. Corn does not contain gluten, and is not on the US allergen list.” Luckily, my friend’s corn allergy is not life-threatening and I didn’t hear back about any severe stomach issues after the reading.

This is yet another lesson about what’s missing on product labels re ingredients. I have not edited the text below so be aware that, despite my efforts at the time, I wasn’t able to produce a corn-free cupcake for the reading. However, I suggest that it would likely work to use a vanilla powder instead of extract, plus substitute finely ground almonds for part of the flour. And now, here’s the original test & recipe…

*****

There’s nothing like a challenge to get the old noggin spiraling with possibilities. Tell me it can’t be done, or that it’s been done and results were usually so-so (or lousy), I’ll want to change that precedent – or at least try. Where there are friends involved, well, I like giving a bit of food-joy when possible. If those friends have allergies or sensitivities to various consumables, therein exists the challenge.

I wanted to ensure that at least one of the cupcakes I baked for the WomanWords 15-Year Birthday Reading at Caffè Lena was gluten-free since two of our readers couldn’t/can’t do gluten (and one WomanWorder who was planning to be in the audience can’t either). I knew another to be lactose-intolerant but she’s always assured me that she can take a pill to offset that condition, provided she doesn’t overdo it. And then there was the corn allergy challenge. Processed food products in this country are saturated with corn – corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated corn products and more “stuff” with names designed to hide the fact that there’s a corn product as our eyes scan the ingredients portion of the label. There’s even a documentary made about it by the guys who author a blog titled “Culinate.” (Go to the site and click on “King Corn” to view a trailer of the film.) I don’t doubt that the overabundance of “hidden corn” has produced many an allergy in unsuspecting Americans.

It turns out that confectioners’ sugar (when we were kids, Mom called it 10X Sugar), at least the brand I purchase, contains corn starch. It keeps it from clumping. I didn’t know weeks ago that I could create my own confectioners’ sugar by spinning granulated sugar through the blender (not, apparently, the food processor), and so I came up with a mascarpone-based frosting that relied on flavor not from sugar, but from soft sweet cheese and finely-ground almonds (plus a bit of bakery emulsion and cinnamon). It was excellent, tasty and corn-free!

I couldn’t concoct the same decadent almond cupcakes that I’m made for daughter Kristen’s birthday last fall. That delicious version called for self-rising flour, which I didn’t have in a g-free version. I had to come up with something sans a wheat flour.

I started with a basic Traditional Vanilla Birthday Cake recipe in the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook by Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey (Simon & Schuster, 1999), which I would also use for the Vanilla cupcakes I’d bake for the Lena Reading. In order to try for the same sort of texture that the original recipe’s combo of self-rising and all-purpose flours would produce, but in a gluten-free rendition, I researched a bit and came up with a mixture of all-purpose flour, almond flour (some of which I substituted with finely ground almonds) and xanthan gum (pretty much essential for g-f baking).

Since the cakes I’d made for Kristen had called for baking powder (Magnolia’s did not), I thought I might add that too – and then I checked the ingredients on the container. First one was corn starch, so I pulled out my handy-dandy little paperback, Substituting Ingredients: The A to Z Kitchen Reference by Becky Sue Epstein (Sourcebooks, 1986, 2010). I love this book’s philosophy: “Don’t have an ingredient? Substitute. Don’t like something? Substitute. Can’t afford it? Substitute.” It also often works for “Body can’t handle an ingredient?” Substitute.) It offered four different substitutions, from which I opted for the baking-soda/cream-of-tartar one.

I got raves for these cupcakes, even from folks who don’t have to do gluten-free. People especially loved the frosting!

GLUTEN-FREE, CORN-FREE ALMOND CUPCAKES (with mascarpone and cream cheese almond frosting)
Yields 2 dozen cupcakes (original Vanilla Cake recipe makes a 3-layer cake)

THE CAKES

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened


• 2 cups granulated sugar (I’m now mostly buying “evaporated cane juice organic sugar” – BJ’s has started to carry it!)


• 4 large eggs, at room temperature


• 2 cups gluten-free, all-purpose flour


• ¾ cup almond flour (ok to sub part of this with finely ground almonds – which I toasted first!)


• 1¼ teaspoon xanthun gum (remember to store unused portion of this in the freezer to avoid spoiling, unless you’re doing lots of gluten-free baking!)


• 1 cup milk


• 1 teaspoon almond extract

Process

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.


2. Place 24 paper cupcake fillers in cupcake tins, or grease and lightly flour each cakespace.


3. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer at medium speed, cream the butter until smooth.


4. Add sugar to butter gradually, then beat until fluffy (about 3 minutes).


5. One at a time, add eggs. Beat well after each addition.


6. Combine the flours, ground almonds (if using), xanthan gum, cream of tartar and baking soda in another bowl with a whisk.


7. Add flour mixture in four parts, alternating with the milk and almond extract, beating well after each addition.


8. Divide batter between the prepared cupcake tin spaces.


9. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into a couple of the little cakes comes out clean.


10. Remove tins to wire racks and allow to cool for about 10 minutes.


11. Remove cakes from tins to wire racks to cool completely before frosting or freezing. (If freezing, individually wrap in plastic wrap as soon as cooled, eliminating all air. They should keep for at least up to two weeks or even a month. I had never frozen cupcakes before but, via the internet, learned that one should take the wrapping off before thawing – as soon as taken out of the freezer – or they will have a gluey top texture. Then frost. It  worked out great!)

THE FROSTING

Ingredients

• 8 oz. mascarpone cheese


• 4 oz. cream cheese


• 1 tablespoon butter, softened


• 1¼ to 1½ cup finely ground toasted almonds (the finer, the better – although you might want some a little chunkier if you’d like a little texture in the cupcake)


• 1 scant teaspoon bakery emulsion (or vanilla extract)


• ¼ teaspoon cinnamon (I use my favorite Roasted Saigon Cinnamon)


• 2 tablespoons milk – I use 2% milk (possibly more milk, to get preferred consistency)

Process

1. In a large bowl, beat together mascarpone and cream cheeses with butter until well-blended.


2. Gradually add toasted ground almonds to cheese mixture, beating between additions.


3. Add bakery emulsion, cinnamon and milk, beating until well-blended.


4. Frost the cakes! (Cupcakes should be stored in the refrigerator since this frosting contains cheeses.)

My g-free gourmet friend, Leslie, gave them a major thumbs-up. And the cakes were just as yum-o the next day – which is, too often, not the case with gluten-free baking!