LAFFlines #16: Ad Lib Muffins
Too bad the screen isn’t scratch-n-sniff. Or, better yet, scratch and taste.
You know what absolutely bellows I love you?
Rutabaga muffins.
And not rutabaga muffins with, like, a teaspoon of rutabaga extract per dozen. I’m talking about rutabaga muffins with over half a pound of rutabaga.
The fact that I know that there were 323 grams of rutabaga in the muffins I made my unsuspecting beloved on Valentine’s Day is unusual. I’m a muffin ad-libber. Give me a blender and a root vegetable, and I’ll give you a muffin. Some folks say that cooking is an art and baking is a science. But I approach the making of delicious food more like athletics: You’ve got to get in there somatically. Use your hands. Open your senses. Feel it. Move around. Immerse yourself in the visceral. Overthinking will disrupt the flow and lead to stodginess. (Stodginess is, of course, a risk factor for choking—at the table and the starting line.)
When I make muffins, I follow my senses. No measuring cups, no scales, no written instructions. I pour, sprinkle, drizzle, stir, blend, and scrape until the batter wafts sweetness and clings to the spatula just right. To capture how I made these muffins, I placed a scale—which I bought last February when I had to settle on precise measurements to earn the state food permit for LAFF protein crumbles—under the blender (and then the mixing bowl). I recorded the weights as I tossed in ingredients. It went like this:
Here we go! (That’s the rutabaga, maple syrup, aquafaba, and pulverized oats.)
Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Spray a standard, 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray. In a large blender, pulverize 270 grams of rolled oats into flour. Add about 320 grams of peeled, cubed, and boiled rutabaga (about 1 medium rutabaga) plus the liquid (“aquafaba”) from one 15.5 oz can of chickpeas (which turned out to be 167 grams) plus 323 grams of pure maple syrup. Blend until the rutabagas are liquified. Add 300 grams of diced apple (2 apples with the peel on), 19 grams of vanilla extract, and 4 grams of apple cider vinegar. Blend until the apples are the consistency of a chunky applesauce. Add 121 grams of chopped pecans and blend until the nuts are specks.
Yes, I recommend overfilling the muffin cups.
Whisk 256 grams whole wheat flour, 6 grams of baking powder, 5 grams of baking soda, 8 grams of nutmeg, and a dash of fine sea salt in a large bowl. Pour the contents of the blender over the flour mixture and stir with a spoon until the ingredients are just combined. The batter will be thicker than pancake batter but thinner than a cookie dough. Scoop the batter into the prepared muffin pan. Each muffin cup should be full. The batter is thick enough to mound on top so that you get The.Best.Muffin.Tops. Bake in the center rack of the oven for 10 minutes at 400 degrees. (Rotate the pan if your oven, like mine, is uneven.) Turn down the oven to 375 degrees and bake for another 25-30 minutes. The muffins are done when (1) their top holds shape when lightly pressed with a very clean index finger, (2) they slide out of the pan easily, (3) they thunk when flicked on the bottom, (4) your kitchen is levitating in nutmeg, and (5) you can’t wait any longer to taste one. Immediately transfer the muffins from the pan to a cooling rack…except for one. Promptly tear it in half, passing from one hand to the other if it’s too hot to hold normally, all while centering your face directly over the muffin steam. Luxuriate in your nutmeg facial. If your eyes are still open, GIVE IN. Close your eyes. Eat the muffin.
Muffin + cupcake = muffcake #hybrid
Now, while those muffins were cooking, in crept a doubt about the love message of rutabagas. Clear communication is key in a relationship. Ergo, truffles. Ad-lib, Act 2:
Given that truffles earned their name because of their resemblance to fungus, I’m not sure if these chocolates help my Valentine’s message.
Line a plate, cutting board, or baking sheet with parchment paper. Make sure your freezer has space for whatever you lined (but don’t it put it in the freezer yet!). Soak 14 pitted Medjool dates (203 grams) in boiling water for 10 minutes; completely drain them; place them in a food processor. Melt three 2.8 ounce bars of 80% dark chocolate (242 grams) in a cereal bowl in the microwave, stirring every 30 seconds until there are only a few chunks or slivers of solid chocolate remaining. Simply stir the chocolate until all of those slivers disappear. Add the melted chocolate to the dates and blend while you retrieve a bag of super-fine almond flour. Stop the food processor and scrape down the sides of the blender with a spatula. Add 127 grams of almond flour. Blend and scrape, blend and scrape…repeating until you have a thick, sticky paste with no discernible date bits. Use a cookie scoop or spoon to scoop the chocolate-almond-date paste onto whatever you lined with parchment paper. The scoops do not need to be neat—just get dollops onto the parchment. Place the dollops in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. When they’re firm enough to handle, roll them into balls between your palms, and return them (naked truffles) to the parchment paper. Place the naked truffles into the refrigerator while you melt 162 grams of semi-sweet dark chocolate chips in a cereal bowl in the microwave just as you did the bars of chocolate (i.e., stirring every 30 seconds). During the 30 second intervals, whisk baking cocoa powder with three generous pinches of Maldon sea salt flakes in a cereal bowl. (I forgot to use the scale for the cocoa—let’s estimate ¾ cup). Remove the naked truffles from the refrigerator. Balance one truffle on top of a fork and lower it into the melted chocolate. Lift it out then roll it off the fork into the salted cocoa powder. Roll it around with your fingers (or the fork), then place it back on the parchment. Repeat with all of the truffles. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Pile on a plate haphazardly—neither science, nor art, just pure physicality—beside the rutabaga muffins and wait for your beloved to come home from morning swim practice.
Photo by Steve.
Where to Purchase LAFF
Roanoke Co+op (Grandin location)
Eats (Blacksburg)
Online store: Delivery is free in the New River Valley.
Email: Email me at hello@laffkitchen.com if you prefer to pay by check or cash, OR if you have any trouble with the online store.
Last Note
First, let me clarify that my scale is my best friend in the commercial kitchen. When it comes to baking LAFF protein crumbles, she and I do everything together.
Second, the Valentine’s Day truffles are super dense. They’re sturdy enough to travel to the ACC Swimming and Diving Championships with Steve this week. If you want a softer, more ganache-y interior, puree the dates with (a) chocolate chips instead of chocolate bars and (b) almond butter instead of almond flour.
Third, how did the muffins and truffles go over? Indeed, the truffles came out on top. All hail the valentine victor. But the muffins were close behind. Before I divulged the secret ingredient, Steve devoured half of one. After the big rutabaga reveal, he devoured the other half. “A true treat” he called them.
My true love, he is.
Cheers,
Abby
P.S. Grammar, too, is science, art, and athletics. The Oxford English Dictionary hyphenates ad-lib when used as a verb, but not when it’s a noun, adjective, or adverb. In contrast, Wikipedia hyphenates ad-lib when it’s a verb or noun, but not when it’s an adjective or adverb. Both sources agree that ad lib comes from the Latin phrase ad libitum: to one’s pleasure. Seems applicable to hyphens and nutmeg.
*I am not affiliated with any companies other than LAFFkitchen.*