Maple muffin making: Maple and Cinnamon Muffins
Wednesday, if I’m at home, is my day for baking and yesterday I decided that I needed to make some muffins. I have a little book called Marvellous Muffins by Robyn Martin for a couple of weeks now (another Trademe purchase!) but it’s just been lazily sitting around the kitchen, not contributing to my life in any way. I took it down yesterday and leafed through it, trying to decide what kind of muffin sounded most appealing – and what I had the ingredients in the cupboard for!
My eye alighted on a recipe for Ginger Gem Muffins – but I wasn’t in a very gingery mood. The recipe also needed golden syrup, not available in my pantry, but what I did have was a bottle of precious maple syrup, a present from my Canadian friend here in Christchurch. From that thought it was the work of mere seconds to decide to substitute the golden syrup with maple syrup and the ginger with cinnamon. But, when I was in the middle of making the muffins, I discovered that, come hell or high water, there was just no way I could get the top off the maple syrup bottle and so had to use an inferior “maple-flavoured” syrup instead.
The end results did suffer for the stuck bottle top. Instead of that deliciously rich depth that you get from maple syrup I could only taste cinnamon. Not that the muffins were inedible, in fact there’s only a couple left, but they didn’t turn out the way that I had hoped. Next time I’ll have to put the Boyfriend’s strength into action and defeat that bottle!
Note to self: a handful of pecans wouldn’t go amiss the next time either.
Maple and Cinnamon Muffins
Butter – 50g
Maple syrup – 2 tablespoons (substitute “maple-flavoured” syrup at your peril!)
Soft brown sugar – ¼ cup
Eggs – 2
Milk – 1 cup
Plain flour – 2 cups
Cinnamon – 1 tablespoon
Baking soda – 1 teaspoon
Baking powder – 1 teaspoon
Preheat oven to 200°C. Melt butter and maple syrup in a saucepan which has enough room to mix all the other ingredients. Mix in brown sugar. Lightly beat eggs and combine them with milk. Sift flour, cinnamon, baking soda and baking powder into the saucepan, add liquids and mix quickly to just combine. Fill muffin cases three-quarters full and put in hot oven. Cook for 15-20 minutes or until the muffins spring back when lightly touched.
Makes 15.
Caroline these sound gorgeous, quick question though could you have done them in the breadmaker?
While my breadmaker does have a cake baking setting and I could have probably taken the mixture out and divided it into muffin tins before it decided to cook it into one cake, I wouldn’t trust it to mix muffins without over-mixing them. Even by hand it’s all too easy to mix too enthusiastically and then the muffins turn out nastily tough. A gentle combining of ingredients, and being aware that doesn’t matter if you have lumps in the mixture, is the trick – not something that the breadmaker would have realised!
Caroline, I’m going to try these and let you know how I get on. Printing out the recipe as I speak.
Vera: Good luck! The trick is not to mix them too much – and make sure that you use real maple syrup.