I’m not the kind of baker who wanders into the kitchen, in the mood to bake, and ever, ever settles on muffins. I don’t even really consider eating muffins. I suppose they’re okay for brunch or at a breakfast bar, but I would much rather have french toast, a danish, or burrito. Muffins are just never on my radar.
I had some plums left over from making Plum Oat Crisp and this recipe is the only other one in the MSBH that uses plums, so I figured now is as good a time as ever to make muffins. If you want my honest opinion, I think the MSBH people really phoned this one in. It’s alright, but nothing special. It certainly doesn’t remind me of coffee cake and dropping a spoonful of chopped plums into the middle of each muffin doesn’t seem all that special.
That being said, it’s a fairly quick & easy recipe and the muffins taste just fine.
Wet ingredients (including a fair amount of melted butter) are poured and then folded with the dry.
The batter is spooned into buttered muffin tins and a couple tablespoons of chopped plums are placed on top.
Then another couple spoonfuls are dropped on top of the fruit and cinnamon-sugar is sprinkled on top.
They baked up easily enough, although I didn’t have enough batter to finish all the muffins.
Muffin top! I know you want to get with this, but I’m just here to dance.
I honestly don’t know why the plum pieces could not just be folded in to the batter. Spooning them in the middle didn’t really result in anything special. Am I right?
[...] simple results. You may recall that I was similarly underwhelmed with the MSBH’s recipe for Plum Coffee Cake Muffins. The third muffin recipe in the book, Cranberry Zucchini Muffins, was likewise disappointing, so [...]
[...] Plum Coffee-Cake Muffins were another disappointing recipe for me. Again, it wasn’t a failure, but I just expected [...]
Is it possible that the fruit isn’t folded in in order to avoid over mixing the batter? Muffin and cake recipes often warn against overmixing – stopping when just moist, but with some flour still visible should result in an extremely fluffy finished product. I wouldn’t know… I always manage to overmix mine!
Possibly, Melanie. Another thing that makes sense is that adding them at the end to the top would keep them from all sinking to the bottom of the muffins (perhaps)? Who knows!