My go-to recipe for muffins these days is Matt Stone’s wonderful Greenhouse muffin recipe, blogged here. His book The Natural Cook Maximum Taste Zero Waste is one of my favourite reference cookbooks at the moment. This recipe works well, as Matt suggests letting the mixture sit in the fridge overnight to let the flour hydrate and the flavours deepen. The resulting texture and taste are exceptional!
I’m experimenting with different flavours for this recipe. This recipe features rosemary, a fragrant woody herb, which gives the muffins a lovely intense aromatic flavour. I’ve used apples, and lots of cinnamon and ground ginger. I drizzled the muffins with a lemon icing, which complements the rosemary beautifully.
Ingredients
4 free-range eggs
280g raw sugar
200g apples, unpeeled and grated
150ml vegetable oil
10g chopped fresh rosemary
300g or wholemeal plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp salt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Enough icing sugar to make a lemon icing that will glaze the muffins, and drip a little over the sides
Method
Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees fan-forced 180 degrees non fan-forced.
Whisk the eggs together in a large mixing bowl and once things start to get foamy, slowly begin to pour in the sugar. Keep whisking until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture has doubled in size. Whisk in the apple, oil and chopped rosemary. Use a spatula to gently fold in the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and salt.
The mixture can be baked straight away, but Matt suggests leaving it in the fridge overnight. This will give the flour a chance to hydrate and the baking powder to activate, resulting in a more consistent muffin texture. The mix will keep for 3–4 days in the fridge too.
Grease a 12-hole standard muffin tin and line the holes with squares of baking paper. Spoon in the muffin mixture and press it down to the level of the tin.
I used my fancy new Silverwood molds instead – available pretty easily in the UK, but if you’re in Australia like me, you will need to go to Blackwood Lane in Melbourne to buy them. If you want to use a fancy mold, my advice is to butter and flour very carefully to avoid the muffins sticking. I actually butter the molds, stick in the fridge for 10 minutes, then butter again, and finally flour.
Here is a photo of the molds I used:
Place the tray in the oven and cook for about 20 minutes, checking with a skewer to see if the muffins are cooked.
Once cooked, remove the muffins from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for 5–10 minutes. Remove them from the tin, peel off the baking paper and place on a wire rack to cool completely.
To make the lemon glaze, mix the lemon juice with enough icing sugar to achieve the desired consistency.
Spoon the lemon glaze over the muffins, allowing a little to drop down the sides.
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