Hamstergbert recipe
These muffins are nice and moist and disappeared like snowballs in July. Mrs HGB hoovered a couple down very enthusiastically with a cup of coffee in the sunshine.
The quantities shown below are to make 12 or so muffins – while developing the recipe I inadvertently finished up making a batch of almost 30 of them and from the way the theatre group gannets demolished them, perhaps it is just as well I did.
Do in advance if you can (see method)
15-20 dried apricots coarsely chopped
3-4 tbsp heaped blanched almonds, coarsely chopped
Orange juice – optional (see method)
2 Eggs
180ml Milk
100ml Sunflower Oil
75gm Granulated Sugar
75gm Soft Brown Sugar
260g PlainFlour or 290 gm if not using ground almonds
80g Ground almonds
3 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt pref sea salt
1 tsp almond extract (not flavouring!)
Method
Apricots in advance
Chop the dried apricots – I usually make one cut lengthwise then three across, thus cutting into eight pieces. Put them into a cleaned out jam jar and cover with orange juice (NOT squash) , ensuring that there is a good inch or so of orange over the top of the apricots. Lid back on and give the whole thing a good shake.
Put into the fridge for a couple of hours, preferably overnight, but at a push just give 'em as long as you can.
The fruit will absorb the orange juice and plump up – this helps to make these muffins nice and juicy.
Before starting the main recipe, strain the apricots out of the orange juice (catching the juice) and when satisfied that you have removed as much loose orange as possible, stir in the chopped almond flakes.
Main part
Preheat the fan oven to 180°C (non-fan 200°C).
Load the muffin tray with muffin cases (makes 12 large ones or 15 mediums)
Put the eggs, sunflower oil, almond extract and the milk into a large mixing bowl and lightly beat together. Add the two types of sugar and 1 tbsp of the orange juice and beat thoroughly. (You can discard the rest of the 'caught' juice)
Mix together the flour, salt and baking powder and sift onto the mix then roughly stir it all in.
Add the apricots and almonds mix and roughly mix them in - it does not have to be absolutely smooth. In fact it will not be.
Three-quarters fill each muffin case with the muffin mixture. If you have spare almonds you can optionally chuck a few bits on the top of each muffin. There's posh for you.
Bake the muffins for 25 minutes. Allow to cool for ten minutes in the muffin tin then carefully lift out and place on a wire rack to continue cooling. Sneakily hide a couple (merely to act as 'baker's quality control samples', you understand) before turning the vultures loose on them.