Ginger Peach Muffins

Wow, our posting has really slowed down since fall semester started! Who'd have thunk it?

I'm supposed to be working on screening documents this weekend, and I swear to God I have been. But I need the occasional break. Also, I had a very vivid dream last week about ginger peach muffins, which I'm sure I had never eaten before--or even seen, although a quick scan of the interwebs tells me that they are not unknown.

The ginger peach muffins in my dream (which had flavors. I don't often have dreams with flavors) were laced with a gingery swirl, sort of like the marzipan swirl in Ben & Jerry's "Mission to Marzipan" ice cream, a flavor which Amber and I have discussed in some detail. But I don't know quite how to make ginger-flavored marzipan in the first place, let alone how to put it into a muffin. However, I did have a basic muffin recipe from The Joy of Cooking, and some ideas about how to make the muffin taste good even if I couldn't recreate the swirl from my dream. So, moving on!

The next problem I encountered was the Inferior California Peach.



Look at that. That is a ripe yellow peach. That is the best ripe yellow peach I could find (at a reasonable price). I usually don't think of myself as Southern, but I did grow up in Georgia, and damn if I can't tell a Superior Georgia Peach from an Inferior California One.

The peach was so wimpy that I decided to saute it first.



Because a combination of:
1 tbsp butter, melted
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon

is guaranteed to improve almost everything, including:
1 ripe yellow peach, peeled, pitted, and finely diced

Saute it until the peach is soft and the syrup is syrupy (around 5 minutes), then remove from heat and let cool. Meanwhile, whisk together in a large bowl:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

And in another large bowl, whisk thoroughly:
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp amaretto (optional. I have a bottle from the cupcake experiment, so probably a lot of things I bake over the next couple of months will have amaretto in them.)
Cooled peach mixture

Make a well in the dry ingredients, then add wet and blend quickly, with only a few strokes. The batter should still be lumpy. Spoon into a cupcake pan - you'll want paper liners.

Before baking, sprinkle a few tiny pieces of diced candied ginger and about 1 tsp quick-cooking oats over each muffin. Like so:



Bake at 400 degrees for 18-20 minutes.



They puff nicely.

Option: If you like ginger more than I do (I don't love ginger so much, really), you could finely dice more candied ginger and add that to the batter. It does turn out that finely dicing candied ginger is hella annoying, because it goes all soft and sticky as soon as you try to manipulate it.

I also wish these were a tiny bit peachier. Or maybe my sample muffin just got short shrift on the peach bits. But I might try this with two (small) peaches next time.

Media Pairing: Sing it with me! "My muffin top is all that, whole grain, low-fat..."

Recipe review: Chef Chloe's Vegan Raspberry Tiramisu Cupcakes

As you have probably guessed from the fact that nearly every baking experiment I've blogged has involved massive, massive quantities of butter, I am not a vegan. But I've been meaning to try some vegan baking--partially because I'm curious, partially because I might one day want to bake something for a person who is allergic to eggs or dairy (or, you know, is vegan. I do live in California, after all, and "are you vegan" is not really a weird question). And my dissertation has suddenly taken an animal rights sort of bent. So when I read an article in the New York Times recently, and it linked to a recipe for apparently very good raspberry tiramisu cupcakes, I thought, "why the hell not?" even though I don't watch Cupcake Wars. Somewhere in my mind, I am aware that "why the hell not" is not always a valid reason to do something. But we're talking about cupcakes here, so why the hell not? I like raspberry, and I like tiramisu, and I like cupcakes, so I went to Whole Foods and bought vegan hippie food things and their lavender-scented shampoo which I love because it makes my hair shiny (and look, I eat butter, but I don't see any reason for toiletries and cosmetics to involve animal products or testing), and then I also went to Ralphs, because the lemons at Whole Foods were a dollar each which is absurd, and also Whole Foods doesn't stock amaretto.



My cupcakes are not as pretty as the ones pictured on Chef Chloe's blog. I did not go to the trouble and/or expense of buying carob, mint leaves, and fresh raspberries to garnish. Thus, what with the coffee-amaretto frosting, my cupcakes look a little bit like poo. I can admit that.

I think they taste more or less okay. There are some weird textural issues, and I don't know if they're my fault, or if vegan cake is just like this. Mainly, the cupcakes tested clean with the toothpick, but they seem a little underdone. Vaguely oily. The bottoms of my cupcake papers were greasier than non-vegan cupcakes. I don't know.

Problem two: the cake recipe calls for coconut milk. I love coconut and can't taste it at all in the cake. The boyfriend unit hates coconut, and thought the cake tasted overwhelmingly of coconut.

Problem three: The "soaking liquid" and raspberry sauce combine to make this a very soggy cupcake, indeed. Scroll back up to the finished cupcake. You can see that the teaspoonful or so of espresso-flavored amaretto has soaked clean through to the bottom of the paper.



This is not a cupcake to be picked up in one's hand and eaten like a cupcake. This is a cupcake requiring plates and forks.

Problem three and a half: The recipe doesn't say anything about straining the raspberry sauce. I loathe picking seeds out of my teeth, so I strained it. But maybe the seeds were meant to keep it thick in some way.

Problem four (not really a problem, but I'm mentioning it anyway): The frosting is really, really, really sweet. (Also, recipe says two tablespoons of water, but I needed four, and also added another two tablespoons of soaking liquid to it.) The raspberry sauce and soaking liquid are, respectively, tart and bitter (though the former has sugar).



If you manage to get all of the components in one bite, it's pretty good. If you don't, it's either tart, bitter, or makes your teeth crumble right out of your head. Since the cupcakes do not have tops and the frosting is stiff, you pretty much have to pipe the frosting on, which means there is more frosting, which means more feeling like your teeth are crumbling.



I need an actual vegan to come eat the cupcakes and tell me if I've done this right and vegan baked goods are just like this, or if I actually did something wrong somewhere. One of the professors I'm TAing for this year is a vegetarian, and his daughter owns a vegan bake shop somewhere on the east coast. He asked to read one of my academic papers a few weeks ago; showing up on Monday with a cupcake and asking for a critique of it is similar, right?

Media Pairing: I haven't seen this film yet--like so many other films I'm supposed to have seen by now, it is languishing in my Netflix queue. Regardless, may I recommend Examined Life? The director, Astra Taylor, and her sister Sunny Taylor (who's in the film, and pictured briefly here in the trailer, with Judith Butler) are both vegans/animal rights activists/all-around awesome people. We used to be in a homeschool group together, back in the years when we would've been in middle school (or Sunny and I would've been; Astra's a few years older). Support independent documentary filmmaking!



Slavoj Zizek appears to be dressed as a construction worker. What's not to like?