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Ricotta, Lemon, and Blackberry Muffins

07.15.2017 by J. Doe // 2 Comments

Most people can tell when it’s rhubarb season because they go in their back yard garden, and see rhubarb growing. It’s a good method, and it goes without saying, a fairly obvious one.

As with so many things, it doesn’t work quite like that at my house. It could, of course, but when I started my little garden, I immediately filled the planting beds with every type of herb and four or so zucchini plants; later that year, I had learned the answers to important gardening questions, such as:  What Does Slug Damage Look Like?  How Do You Get Rid of Powdery Mildew? and the all-important, Why Shouldn’t I Grow Four Zucchini Plants?

When the main beds were full, The Child requested a spot to grow strawberries, and located an unused sunny spot right next to the similarly unused shed. The shed once had a function – it stored gardening equipment owned and theoretically used by The Departed, but left behind when he departed and subsequently discovered to be unusable (weed whacker with missing cords, leaky gas can for use with nonexistent lawn mower), expired (10-pound bags of moss-be-gone and fertilizer, each with a few handfulls missing), or simply unrelated to gardening (half-full cans of latex paint, an outgrown bicycle). When the beds were put in, I put a few useful-seeming implements into a small box, which I stored in a convenient location, near the beds. So the large shed sits, mostly empty and completely out of sight. 

We put a small bed next to the shed, and the cleaning lady gifted several strawberry plants, and since there was a little space left, I added a rhubarb plant. I made muffins the first year, and posted the recipe here.  Each year since, I notice one day that my blog suddenly has a lot of traffic, most of it coming from pinterest and all of it going to that one recipe.

When this happens, I go outside and discover I have rhubarb, and lots of it. Then I make muffins, too. And jam. And cookies. And a pie, if I feel like pie, or a cake, if I feel like cake. If my neighbor has brought apples from her tree, I make rhubarb applesauce and share it with her.

I give rhubarb away to neighbors, and when they’ve had enough, too, I freeze some. Sometimes I use it during the winter, and even then, I often still have some when winter becomes spring and rhubarb muffin bakers re-appear on this blog, and my rhubarb re-appears outside.

Blackberries are a somewhat similar story, or at least, they were until this year. They grow wild in the area, by which I mean, untended spaces are quickly overrun with masses of thorny bushes. They crowd out everything else, and make nice homes for bunnies and rodents. There are service companies that have entire businesses based on removing blackberry bushes, some of which employ herds of goats to deal with the problem.

We live next door to a community college with a large property, some of it undeveloped, and while this means that there are an assortment of critters that live there and pay us occasional visits – a regrettable assortment of moles, rats, raccoons, as well as, more pleasantly, rabbits and the occasional deer – it also means that every year, in August, I can walk the college grounds on my lunch hour and pick blackberries for baking, for eating, and of course, for freezing.

That is, until last year. The the bulldozers appeared; the blackberries disappeared. Bunnies appear in my back yard, to the delight of my cats; rats appear in my neighbors’ garage, to the dismay of everyone on our block.

I could have found another blackberry-picking spot last year, but there was no urgency about it, since I was still working through the numerous bags in my freezer, not to mention an ample supply of blackberry jam, so I didn’t. This year, I made muffins, and upon discovering the muffins were quite delicious, decided to make a second batch, only to find I had finally exhausted the seemingly inexhaustible supply of frozen wild blackberries.

Finding the recipe – like having endless, free wild blackberries – was a bit of good fortune; I received a review copy of The Harvest Baker, by Ken Haedrich. I had previously enjoyed a book he co-authored with the late, great Marion Cunningham, the Maple Syrup Cookbook, so I was pleased to receive another of his books and give it a try.

As baking books go, it’s pretty straightforward, which is one of the things I enjoy about Haedrich’s books: They are meant to be cooked from. Yes, there are a couple of recipes that veer off into Look At Me Being Unique territory, notably a recipe for Whole Wheat Blueberry Beet Muffins, which are certainly colorful, if not enticing.

I showed the photo of those to The Child, who remarked, You know, we can all learn something from Jurassic Park: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Still, that was just one recipe, and there are numerous others that we found incredibly enticing. As it happens, The Child’s favorite cookies – which I have, oddly, never shared on this site – are Lemon Ricotta cookies, soft, tender, and tart, so I was delighted to find a similar offering, in muffin form: Ricotta, Lemon, and Blackberry Muffins.

They were everything I hoped they would be: Tender and light muffins, brightly flavored with lemon and studded with sweet-tart blackberries. They don’t require any special equipment, just a mixing bowl, and if you happen to have blackberries in your freezer, you can toss them into the batter still frozen.

The Child adored them, and they were gone in just a couple of days, leaving me with the problem I never expected to have: I had no more blackberries with which to make another batch. There were other recipes of interest, so I did make more muffins, notably a batch of strawberry rhubarb muffins that were made special by the addition of some cardamom to the batter – rhubarb and cardamom, like rhubarb and strawberries, are made for each other.

But what The Child wanted most was more of these lovely muffins, so we’ve already begun to keep an eye out for the white blackberry flowers that, in August, will replenish our stock, even if we have to venture a bit further away to pick them.

 


Ricotta, Lemon, and Blackberry Muffins
 
Print
Author: adapted from Ken Haedrich, The Harvest Baker
Ingredients
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp baking soda
  • ¾ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp nutmeg
  • 1 cup ricotta cheese
  • ½ cup sour cream
  • ½ cup milk
  • 5 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
  • 1 egg
  • grated zest of one large lemon
  • ½ tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 cups blackberries (fresh or frozen)
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 400° F. Line a 12-cup muffin pan with paper liners, and set aside.
  2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. Set aside.
  3. In a different large bowl, whisk together the ricotta, sour cream, milk, melted butter, egg, lemon zest, and vanilla. Gradually add in the sugar, blending thoroughly. Make a well in the dry ingredients, and pour in the liquid mixture, stirring thoroughly. When there are still streaks of flour in the batter, add the blackberries, folding gently just until the batter is evenly mixed.
  4. Divide the batter evenly between the muffin cups, Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the muffins are nicely risen and the tops are golden brown.
  5. Cool the muffins for 5 minutes in the pan, then remove and finish cooling on a wire rack.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // baking, blackberries, muffins

Macrina Bakery’s Rocket Muffins

03.05.2015 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

For the past few summers, The Child and I have been tormented by unwanted guests. Not the rats that occasionally move into the crawl space, silent and unseen. Not the moles, which are visually destructive, but silent, and at least provide some marginal comic relief, in the form of neighbors doing Bill Murray In Caddyshack impressions.

The bees, on the other hand, we can hear, and they’re loud: They buzz aggressively on the other side of my office wall, and The Child’s bedroom wall.

Last summer, I hired a bee guy, who couldn’t locate them easily, but based on an inspection of the outside of the house, informed me that my noisy neighbors were “probably” mud daubers. They are tiny and harmless wasps, he said. Probably coming in through the vent screens. I suggest you wait until winter, when they go dormant, and replace the screens.

He took my check and was on his way.

With winter almost over – at least in Seattle – my thoughts turned to Spring, and I called my handyman, who stopped by and inspected the crawl space next to my office, and the one next to The Child’s room, and then the attic area; he found nothing. He moved his ladder outside, and climbed onto the garage roof, and inspected the wall. Eventually he climbed down, and said he’d found two warped siding boards: The gaps are how the bees were getting in, he said. Your screens are fine.

Then he handed me his phone, to show me the pictures he’d taken of the furnace vent, specifically, the holes that had rusted out of it. He went into the attic again, and came back with more pictures: more rusty holes. I stare at the pictures like the inadequately knowledgeable homeowner I am.

Those holes will vent carbon monoxide into your attic, he tells me.

I listened to the sound of the mud dauber wasps in my wall all summer, several years in a row, and they frightened me, but could never have hurt me. It would seem I owe them a debt of gratitude, since they led to the discovery of a very real danger that I could have neither seen nor heard. I am grateful to the wasps, as I stand on a ladder, trying to help the handyman loosen rusted pieces of vent pipe. I am grateful to the wasps as I make a note on the grocery list to replace the batteries in the smoke detectors, including the one that kept going off, with no obvious cause, a year or so ago.

I am grateful to the wasps as the handyman nails down the siding, closing off their entrance to my wall.

When the handyman leaves, I lock the back gate after him, and notice that my rhubarb is coming in, and not just a little. I’m absurdly happy: The sun is shining, The Child and I aren’t going to die in our sleep, and there will be rhubarb, soon. Spring is coming; it’s almost here.

There isn’t much in the way of in-season produce that I actually want to eat at the stores, but late last summer I received a small bag of Oregon hazelnuts as a gift, and thought that now would be a good time to use them. I wanted cookies and cakes but since I also had yet another mushy banana to use up – just one this time – I chose a recipe from the Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook that included hazelnuts, a ripe banana, and other things I already had on hand: carrots, molasses. The ingredient list sounded like a healthy way to start a day, and the name – Rocket Muffins – suggested they’d kick-start me with energy.

One thing I didn’t have on hand was whole wheat flour, and since I was feeling kind of lazy, and thus in need of a muffin to kick-start my energy level, I swapped in some dark rye flour to see what would happen. The original recipe also calls for adding a dollop of jam to the top of each muffin during baking, which I skipped entirely, figuring I’d rather add whatever flavor jam I felt like eating at the time I ate each muffin.

I don’t know how these are supposed to taste, and to be honest, when they first came out of the oven, they reminded me of the supposedly healthy “bread” that was the bane of my 1970s school lunches. A liberal dose of melting salted butter did not help matters much.

I set the muffins aside, but vowed I would finish them – all of them – no matter how much jam it took.

The next morning, I was running late, so I grabbed one of the muffins, and ate it at my desk as I began work: No jam, no butter.

It was stupendous.

It’s hard to appreciate a muffin that isn’t sweet, when muffins, for the most part these days, are simply small cakes pretending to be muffins. But when you stop expecting something to be sweet, and when there is no sweetness to overwhelm the flavors, well, you can really taste them. The delicious crunchy, nutty hazelnut was shown off superbly by the earthy rye and molasses; the buttermilk probably accounts for the muffins’ ethereal lightness.

They don’t need jam or butter or to be toasted or anything, except to be eaten.

And the best part: The Child doesn’t like them, so I get them all to myself.

Rocket Muffin

Macrina Bakery's Rocket Muffins
 
Print
Author: adapted from Leslie Mackie, Macrina Bakery Cookbook
Ingredients
  • ¾ cup hazelnuts, toasted, chopped
  • ¾ cup all purpose flour
  • ¾ cup dark rye flour
  • 2 tbsp light brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • 2½ tsp baking soda
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • 1½ cup rolled oats
  • 3 medium carrots, grated
  • 1 small, ripe banana, mashed or pureed
  • 2 eggs
  • ½ cup vegetable oil
  • ½ cup molasses
  • ½ cup buttermilk
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350F. Spread hazelnuts out on a baking sheet and roast until they're golden brown and fragrant (about 15 minutes). Cool slightly and remove the skins by rubbing nuts together in a clean dish towel. Chop coarsely and set aside.
  2. Whisk the flours, brown sugar, baking powder and soda, and salt together in a large bowl. Add the oats, nuts, and carrots; toss together with a spoon or your hands until the carrots are well coated with flour.
  3. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs. Whisk in the banana, oil, molasses, and buttermilk until thoroughly combined.
  4. Add the liquid mixture to the dry mixture, stirring with a fork until the batter just starts to come together.
  5. Spoon the batter into a paper liners in a muffin tin, filling the cups to the top. Bake until the muffins are deep brown and spring back when pressed lightly with a finger, 15-20 minutes. Cool on racks.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // baking, bananas, buttermilk, carrots, hazelnuts, muffins, rye

Marion Cunningham’s Fresh Ginger Muffins

05.23.2014 by J. Doe // 3 Comments

If the shoe fits, wear it. If you happen to live in Seattle in springtime, I suggest rain boots.

For the past few months, my backyard has been a muddy swamp, much of which has been tracked indoors by two dogs: the Red Dog, who lives here permanently, and the Feisty Girl, who was supposed to be only a temporary resident but who shows no signs of having her own permanent home anytime soon. Her presence is a source of despair for the cats, who have not left my bedroom since Feisty Girl arrived, while her eventual departure is a source of distress for The Child, who has proclaimed Feisty Girl to be The Only Dog That Likes Me Most and is convinced that somehow, if we adopt her, it will all work itself out.

I visit the cats regularly during the day, because I miss them, but also because my bedroom window is the only spot I can observe my side yard, which doesn’t sound like a very interesting thing to watch unless you know that there’s a mountain range emerging there, at a pace much faster than glacial. The Himalayas are slackers compared to what’s going on in my yard, but then again, the Himalayas have to wait for tectonic activity to do its thing, and my yard has a decided advantage:  one very active mole.

You can (and really, should) complain about me using this space to make mountains out of molehills, but please don’t – having to draw cat/dog Maginot lines is all I can handle at the moment. The battle rages inside and out: I tried mole repellent, which should have made the mole leave, but he merely chuckled at the effort (I heard him). I moved on to poison worms, which should have been the mole’s last supper, but he was either too full or the worms were not up to his usual culinary standards.

I fought the mole, and lost.

I finally google to find out what actually kills moles, and learn a very helpful thing: traps are very effective, but also illegal in two states, one of which happens to contain my lawn.

My neighbor helpfully suggests that it’s not like anyone would report me or bother me about using the traps – which one can buy anywhere, since they are perfectly legal to sell in Washington State, just not legal to use – but based on the fact that 80% of the drivers I pass on the roads are talking on handheld cellphones, yet I got pulled over for doing the same, I think my personal track record suggests I might be among the unlucky 20% who get caught and fined.

When life hands you lemons, you’re supposed to make lemonade, and maybe I should have, because the lemon buttermilk sorbet I attempted didn’t work out very well. Still, I ended up with a refrigerator full of leftover buttermilk and lemons,  as well as an abundance of ginger from my love affair with Momofuku’s Ginger Scallion Sauce. As luck would have it, these are just the things I needed to make Marion Cunningham’s Fresh Ginger Muffins.

So, one sunny Sunday when I should have been outside enjoying a break in the weather, or, apparently, killing a mole with a shovel (which is legal in Washington), I made muffins. These are a wonderful way to start the day: Light and airy, lightly sweet, and brightly flavored with ginger and lemon. The muffins are studded with little bits of sweet, slightly crunchy ginger. They’re wonderful with a cup of coffee or tea and even better with some berries on the side. They don’t need anything extra, but some currants would be a nice addition.

I did eventually win the Battle of the Mole, by hiring a service that dispensed with the mole the same day they showed up. No, I don’t know how, and no, I don’t care. The battle inside the house rages on.

 

Fresh Ginger Muffins

 

Marion Cunningham's Fresh Ginger Muffins
 
Print
Cook time
20 mins
Total time
20 mins
 
Author: Marion Cunningham, The Breakfast Book
Serves: 16
Ingredients
  • 1 piece unpeeled fresh ginger (4 to 5 oz.)
  • ¾ cup plus 3 Tbs. sugar
  • 2 Tbs. finely grated lemon zest
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • ½ tsp. salt
  • ¾ tsp. baking soda
  • 8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room
  • temperature
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup buttermilk
Instructions
  1. Preheat an oven to 375ºF. Butter standard muffin tins or use paper liners.
  2. Cut the unpeeled ginger into large chunks. In a food processor fitted with the metal blade, process until it is finely minced. You should have about ¼ cup.
  3. In a small saucepan, combine the ginger and ¼ cup of the sugar. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar melts and the mixture is hot; this takes only about 2 minutes. Set aside to cool until tepid.
  4. In a small bowl stir the lemon zest and the 3 Tbs. sugar. Let stand for a few minutes, then add to the ginger mixture. Stir and set aside.
  5. In a medium bowl, stir and toss together the flour, salt and baking soda. Set aside.
  6. In a large bowl, beat the butter until smooth. Add the remaining ½ cup sugar and beat until blended. Add the eggs and beat well. Add the buttermilk and mix until blended. Then add the flour mixture and stir just until blended. Stir in the ginger-lemon mixture.
  7. Spoon into the prepared muffin tins, filling each cup about three-fourths full. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 15 to 20 minutes.
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Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // baking, ginger, muffins

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