Muffins, Old School

Remember the pre-Starbucks America? The one where coffee was a weak-flavored, brown liquid that cost less than a dollar and came with never-ending free refills?

Thank god those days are over. That shit was vile. If you’re too young to remember those days, grab a cup of drip coffee that’s been sitting all day on a warming burner at a gas station, and you’ll get some idea.

Seriously. I mean, I realize that it’s not particularly hip or trendy to praise Starbucks Coffee these days, but they have definitely raised the quality of coffee in this country. If there was any espresso available in my youthful days in the Midwest, I wasn’t aware of it.

But the rise of Starbucks had an unintended side effect. The muffin*, which had previously been a small, mildly indulgent breakfast pastry, grew, as if on steroids, to become a monstrously huge, sugar-encrusted cupcake. It used to be a mildly flavored little cakelet, sometimes with bran, sometimes with blueberries. Now it’s roughly four or five times its original size, and chocolate-flavored† as often as not.

But it used to be relatively small. It used to be pleasant without making one feel engorged and guilty. And it wasn't encrusted with raw sugar (a pet peeve of mine).

To rediscover this lost ancestor of the muffin, we return to the works of Nigella Lawson, who despite being English, seems to understand the American muffin better than most Americans do these days.

It’s a fairly straightforward recipe, the only potential difficulty being her use of self-rising flour, which is popular in the UK and in some parts of the American South, but not used much in the rest of North America, as far as I know. It’s not that self-rising flour isn’t available, mind you, but it’s only available in my neck of the woods in five pound bags, which is not something I’m willing to purchase for one recipe. It’s easily remedied, though, since according to Nigella’s website, all you need do is add 2 teaspoons of baking powder and ½ teaspoon of salt to each cup of all-purpose flour et voila! Homemade self-rising flour. Self-raising flour if you’re nasty (or British).

Standard muffin/quick bread/pancake procedure is the order of the day here. One mixes the dry and wet ingredients separately, and then one adds the wet to the dry, mixing just enough to combine them thoroughly. That said, Nigella, like many other cookery book authors, warns you to make sure that the mixture is still lumpy. I’ve weighed in on this before, but I do think that cooks worry about this unnecessarily. You don’t want to mix it for hours, or anything, but I don’t know that it’s really necessary to worry about leaving lumps in it.

So. To the flour, we add grated orange zest, salt, baking soda, baking powder, sugar and some ground almonds. Whisk that together to combine and sift them all slightly. Why are we adding more baking powder to self-rising flour? No idea. You’ll have to ask la Nige.

In another bowl, whisk together the orange juice, milk, egg and melted butter. In my experience, a normal-sized orange yields just about the amount of juice Nigella calls for. Just make sure you zest the orange before you juice it.

Now add the liquids to the dry stuff, and mix until just combined. Once you’ve mixed it, all you need to do is pour the batter into the paper-lined cups of a muffin tin.

After filling six cups, I added a handful of frozen blueberries to the remaining batter, as I thought they might be nice.

Put the tin into an oven you’ve preheated to 400°F.

Twenty minutes later, pull them out of the oven and let them cool for a bit.

Ideally, while they’re still warm, smear some butter or jam on them and devour them. They're slightly sweet, but not so sweet that you feel you're eating dessert for breakfast. And the addition of blueberries was quite nice, if I do say so myself. 

And yes, I know that it might seem a bit odd to suggest putting butter on these muffins after I’ve spent so much time decrying the excess of the modern shop-bought muffin. Whatever. You really ought to try these soon. They’re much more interesting and flavorful than the cakes that Starbucks has been foisting on us.

Bon appetìt, y’all.

From Nigella Lawson, Nigella Bites:

Orange Breakfast Muffins

6 tbl unsalted butter

1⅔ cups self-rising flour

2 tbl ground almonds

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

¼ cup sugar

zest of one orange

⅓ cup plus 1 tbl freshly squeezed orange juice

⅓ cup plus 1 tbl whole milk

1 egg

12-cup muffin pan lined with 12 paper baking cups

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Melt the butter and set aside. Combine the flour, ground almonds, baking soda, baking powder, sugar and orange zest in a large bowl. Measure the orange juice and milk into a pitcher and whisk in the egg and then the cooled, melted butter. Now pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients, mixing with a fork as you go. The batter will be lumpy but that’s how it should be: you want everything to be no more than barely combined. The whole point of muffin mixture is that it must never be overworked.

Spoon out the mixture equally into the muffin cups and cook for 20 minutes. Remove, in their paper baking cups, to a wire rack and let cool slightly (but not completely) before devouring.

Makes 12.

*For the record, I am speaking of the American muffin, not the English one, which is a savory, crumpet-like, yeast-risen bread cooked on a griddle. What, did you not think I knew the difference?

†As regular readers know, I have no objection to chocolate. In fact, I’m quite fond of it. But I don’t really find it appropriate at breakfast, for some reason. Furthermore, a "chocolate muffin" is not a muffin; it is a chocolate cupcake.