muffin – Gourmet Project

The recipe

My dining companion has been doing a lot of driving for work over the past few months, and I’ve been looking for little treats that travel well to send along with her. These muffins looked like they’d fit the bill, and I was pleased to discover that they’re not just portable, they’re tasty. They’ve got another of Ruth’s seemingly unnecessary streusel toppings, but that’s not such a bad thing.

The recipe follows the standard muffin method, mix the wet stuff together, mix the dry stuff together, add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix until it’s barely combined. In this case the wet stuff is played by melted butter, whole milk, egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, while the roles of the dry stuff are capably portrayed by flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Once the muffin mixture is together, the blueberries are delicately folded in, and the batter is divided into muffin cups. It then gets topped with a shortbread like mixture of flour, butter, and sugar. The muffins bake at 375 for 18 – 20 minutes.

The muffins were very simply flavoured, rich and moist, with a carefully balanced sweetness that enhanced the blueberries. I like to give credit where credit is due, and this is one baked good where The Book got the sugar right. The topping was less successful, the recipe says to bake the muffins ’till they’re golden and crisp, but they were cooked through, and smelling done before the topping changed colour. If I’d waited any longer the undersides would have burned. I think there was just too much topping, so it was left a bit raw looking. It tasted quite good, but wasn’t as visually appealing as I would have liked.

This recipe gets nearly everything right, good texture, clean flavours, satisfying richness, and a wallop of blueberry essence. Unfortunately the undercooked topping takes away from the effect. I’d certainly make these again, but I’d use half the topping, or omit it entirely. It did lend a nice contrasting texture, but the “studies in white, number 6” vibe didn’t do it for me. Overall quite a nice muffin though.

128. Streusel-Sour Cream Coffee Cakes p.645

Unfortunately there’s no recipe online.

The Book has a deep and abiding affection for streusel-toppings. I suspect that if the cooks at the Gourmet test kitchen leave their batter alone for too long, they’ll find that Ruth Reichl has snuck in and covered it in streusel. I don’t particularly have anything against streusel toppings, they add a nice textural contrast, but they tend to be very sweet. If the underlying baked good didn’t already have 30% more sugar than it needed, that could be a nice addition, but here it struck me as trying to gild the already candied lily.

The recipe starts by blending brown and white sugar with flour, salt, and butter. The streusel topping is made by separating out some of this mixture and working in cinnamon, additional butter, more brown sugar, and chopped pecans. A mixture of sour cream, egg, egg yolk, vanilla, baking soda, and orange zest is incorporated with the remainder of the flour-sugars-butter mixture, then divided up into 18 muffin cups, topped with the streusel, and baked.

There are a lot of things I liked about this recipe, but as is often the case The Book went overboard on the sugar (1 3/4 cups of sugar to 2 1/2 cups of flour). The cakes were rich, dense, and moist, with a soft slightly elastic texture. The orange zest in the cakes was an excellent touch. The topping was double extra sweet, but I really liked the complexity the pecans and molasses in the brown sugar brought to the cakes. I wish that the recipe had less sugar, and more nuts. Keeping the nuts out of the cake batter highlighted them and broke up the uniformity of the muffin. Unfortunately the streusel topping had a habit of falling off. Next time I’d be more careful about pushing the topping down into the batter.

This recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch chapter, but these cakes might work better with afternoon coffee, or as a dessert. They were a bit much for breakfast. I brought these over to a pot-luck brunch, to positive reviews, but they didn’t really do it for me. The next day I had one with an unsweetened espresso, and found I liked them much better. The concept and flavours are solid, and the bitter coffee provided some much needed contrast.