A few years back, The Orange County Register had one of the most horrendous advertising bloopers I’ve seen to date. There was this campaign called “Take Back the Morning,” which in itself was genius because it encouraged people to carve out some quiet morning time to read the newspaper. I can get behind that.

But then the message was paired with a whole broadsheet page dedicated to the words “GO AWAY” printed larger than any headline that’s ever run in the paper’s recent history. The idea was that a newspaper reader would be sitting in a chair with an open paper shielding him/her from view, with the back of the newspaper facing the rest of the world and telling it to “GO AWAY.” But instead of the morning distractions going away, I heard of a few cases where offended subscribers did instead. 

The idea was quickly whisked away and replaced by better and more successful ads. The “Take Back the Morning” message faded with it, but it shouldn’t have — I really think the advertisers had something there. Why don’t we take back our mornings from the rituals of rushing to work on time? Waking up a tad earlier on weekdays wouldn’t hurt, I think, especially if you filled your newfound time with some baking. Because then, not only would you be taking back your morning, but you’d also have something to take to work with you to remind you of the time you stole from the snooze button.

For night owls or newbies to this “Take Back the Morning” baking business, mini muffins are right up your alley. You only need to wake up about 25 minutes earlier than you usually do, which shouldn’t be too painful. (As a fellow non-morning person, I can attest to this.) 

You can mix the batter and pop the pan in the oven, letting the muffins bake while you brew coffee or take a quick shower (or read a newspaper!). Standard mini muffin pans also make the batter-measuring process easier: All you need is a rounded measuring tablespoon to scoop up the batter and portion it into the muffin cups. Adding chocolate and toffee chips only sweeten the deal, and if you really need a pick-me-up, dot the tops with crystallized ginger before baking for extra zing. 

BANANA TOFFEE-CHIP MINI MUFFINS 

Yield: 20 mini muffins

• 4 ounces flour
• 2 ounces golden brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1 medium ripe banana, mashed
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup toffee chips
• Optional: Crystallized ginger for topping

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a mini-muffin pan with paper liners, or use a nonstick mini-muffin pan.
2. Add flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into a small bowl. In a larger bowl, add melted butter, milk, egg and mashed banana, and mix thoroughly.
3. Dump the dry ingredients into the bowl of wet ingredients, and whisk with a fork until just combined. Add in chocolate and toffee chips.
4. Using a tablespoon measuring spoon, portion out 1 tablespoon of muffin batter into each muffin cup. Top batter with chopped crystallized ginger, if desired.
5. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center of a muffin comes out clean. Enjoy your morning.

Being in a sour mood doesn’t always have to mean that you want to plant crossed arms in front of your chest or scrunch up your face and hold it there for as long as you can. Being in a sour mood can be a good thing.

Like when you’re in the mood for something sour, for example.

I for one am a big advocate for putting sour cream in quick breads like muffins, pancakes and coffee cake. Sour cream adds a moistness (fat! Yes!) and tang without even a mutter of its presence. If it’s added in the right quantity, you won’t even know it’s there. It’s ummph, and just because it’s pucker-worthy doesn’t mean it’s having a bad day.

(Click “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

I tweaked this Epicurious recipe for sour cream coffee cake just a bit to use some leftover toffee chips and chocolate chips. For the original recipe (which includes a glaze), click here. The batter will look flat and barely cover the pan, but it puffs up really nicely while baking.

SOUR CREAM COFFEE CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE AND TOFFEE CHIPS

Yield: 10-inch round coffeecake
Adapted from Epicurious

• Streusel Topping:
• 1/2 cup granulated or brown sugar, or 1/4 cup each
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg or cloves (optional)
• 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter or margarine, softened
• 34 cup toffee chips
• Batter:
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup granulated or brown sugar or 1/2 cup each
• 4 large egg yolks, or 3 large eggs
• 1 cup (8 ounces) sour cream or plain yogurt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F and spray one 10-inch springform pan with cooking spray. Line with parchment or waxed paper, spray with cooking spray again, and dust with flour.

2. To make the streusel: Combine the sugar, flour, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg if using. Using a fork, cut in the butter to resemble coarse crumbs. Stir in toffee chips.

3. To make the batter: Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl and set aside. In another large bowl, beat the butter until smooth, about 1 minute. Gradually add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time. Blend in the sour cream and vanilla. Stir in the flour mixture, and fold in chocolate chips.

4. Layer your ingredients: Spread half of the batter in the prepared pan. Sprinkle with half of the streusel. Carefully cover with the remaining batter and sprinkle with the remaining streusel.

5. Bake until the cake is golden and pulls away from the sides of the pan, about 50 minutes. Cook in pan on a rack for 15 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature. Wrap it in plastic and store at room temperature for up to 2 days or in the freezer for up to 3 months.

– Cynthia Furey

Macadamia nuts are tough little suckers.

I used to think they were one of the most overpriced nuts on the market. But after a fateful weekend, this girl has learned that she knows absolutely nothing and should keep her mouth shut.

It begins: Earlier this month, some friends and I stopped at the Ventura College flea market. While the market itself was nothing to crow about, the campus was: Macadamia nut trees – tens of them – lined the outside perimeter of the campus. With bags in tow, we began to collect as many unshelled mac nuts as we could. I was giddy with the delight of not having to pay through the nose for them, even contemplating making the two-hour drive monthly for my fix.

My first project would be a macadamia nut tart. How beautiful it would be, with a homemade crust and studded with uniform, chopped mac nuts. I’d serve it with vanilla or praline ice cream, we’d sit on the porch and shoot the breeze, or sit in silence, watching the ribbons of melted ice cream pooling alongside the warm tart.

Now, I had heard that macadamia nuts were hard to crack, but people say the same things about walnuts and almonds. I paid no heed.

Was I ever sorry. These things are serious. This was not a job for a steel nutcracker. This was a job for a steel military tank. I didn’t have access to the latter.

But, be damned, I was going to have my macadamia nut tart. So I explored my options.

A Google search revealed that I was in good company – a slew of sites and blogs featured different methods in which to crack macadamia nut shells open without smashing the nutmeat into smithereens. Vise grips. Roasting. Hammers. Putting them in the freezer. Wedging them into sidewalk cracks and pounding them open. (There was also, ironically, this blog post on a key that opens them, which is commercially sold with unshelled macadamia nuts. I’m jealous.) All of these methods seemed crazy, but according to these sites, they were the only way to get into them unless you had access to the Mauna Loa plant.

I tried one method of roasting them at 350 degrees for 15 minutes to dry out the shells. I’m not quite sure this made a difference, but it did release a buttery roasted nut smell that made me want to get into them even more. Since I didn’t have a vise grip/bench vise, I grabbed a hammer, a towel and a cutting board and set up shop in the middle of my living room. I chose a nut to sacrifice, raised my hammer high above my head and came down on it with such force that it shook the entire room. BOOM. I unwrapped the towel, and the nut was broken alright – but inside was a black, crumbly mass; moldy and inedible. What gives? Furious. I needed to take this outside.

I spent a full hour busting nuts with my hammer. To my right was a pan of broken shells and rotten nuts, to my left, a measly pile of crushed macadamia nuts, barely yielding 1/4 cup. My arms ached, my knees hurt from kneeling. I was defeated, but I needed to make something with these or my efforts would have been in vain. Obviously, a glorious tart was out. And after a quick search on my favorite blogs, banana bread was in. Hallelujah, let’s finish this.

The recipe is from Simply Recipes. It’s simplicity was much appreciated – after spending an hour on my hands and knees smashing nuts, I needed something that required almost nothing from me. This was perfect.

The recipe calls for 1 cup of chopped walnuts. In went my scant 1/4 cup of macadamia nuts, with a handful of peanut butter chips for good measure. They smelled lovely, and tasted even better. Every once in awhile my tongue would flirt with a tiny macadamia nut piece, a little treasure that teasingly reminded me I’ve been wrong all these years about the high cost of macadamia nuts.

• Other things I learned (the hard way):
  The method: If you ever want to try the hammer method, here’s a tip: Cover it with a towel, and try to strike only a portion of the shell instead of head-on. Smashing it right in the middle will crumble the delicate macadamia. By striking it from the side, you have a better chance of the shell shattering and yielding a whole nut. I must tell you that this method only gave me 2 whole macadamia nuts. (Huh. So maybe this isn’t a good tip after all.)
• On the biggest macadamia nut producer in the U.S.: Hawaii is a mellow and laid back state because behind closed doors, its people take out all of their pent-up aggression on breaking coconuts and macadamia nuts. Seriously.
• To reiterate: The high price of macadamia nuts is indeed justified. This girl will never complain again.

– Cynthia Furey

Side note: March Madness is a month-long challenge in which I will post Monday through Friday for the entire month. I hope you will humor me in reading!

Pumpkin is one of my favorite flavors. The following is a recipe I developed; one of my favorites, and the one I’m most proud of. The story (and the above photo that I took) ran in The Orange County Register this month. it can’t be found on the newspaper’s site, so I’ve posted it here. Enjoy!

Food 101: Pumpkin muffins, or cupcakes?
With this recipe, you can choose between the two, or make them both.

By CYNTHIA FUREY
Special to the Register

It’s a question for the ages: What’s the difference between a muffin and a cupcake? If you slather some frosting on a muffin, would that make it a cupcake, or does the difference lie in the general makeup of the baked good? To help answer this plaguing question, I asked Chef Melissa Simpson, baking guru and culinary instructor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, what her opinion was on the matter.

“Generally, I would say there is little difference between cupcakes and muffins,” said Simpson. “Muffins generally use fruit, vegetables or nuts baked inside the batter. Cupcakes are iced and if filled may use ganache, mousse, or creams. Fruits and nuts may be used inside the filling or garnishes on the tops.”

It seems you can often interchange muffin and cupcake recipes as well. For example, coffee cake has a lighter texture than most cakes, and can double as a muffin if it goes sans frosting or icing. “Instead of icing, it might be topped by a crumble or swirled throughout with cinnamon sugar,” Simpson said. “Carrot cake is another prime example. It can be a muffin or cake, topped with nuts (for muffins) or cream cheese icing (for cakes).”

With these clarifications in mind, I went to work on developing a basic muffin recipe that is slightly less sweeter than most recipes, so if you decide to add frosting it won’t be a sugar overload in every bite. Pumpkin, in addition to fitting into the holiday season, has a subdued sweet flavor as well. The cinnamon cream cheese frosting adds enough sugar and spice to transform the mild muffin into a decadent dessert, and the addition of a small amount of brown sugar gives it a slight hint of caramel.

If you’re going the muffin route, you can add nuts or chocolate chips to the batter to make them heartier for a breakfast meal, or to serve with coffee or tea. Eat them right out of the oven, or give them a short stint in the microwave to warm them up.

If going the cupcake route, you can pipe frosting on with a pastry bag or spread it on with a knife. These cupcakes will be lovely either way as long as you make sure to use at least two tablespoons of frosting for each cupcake (this will give you the professional-looking rounded top that you see in bakeries). I like to sprinkle a small amount of ground nutmeg over the frosting as an elegant finishing touch.

And for those who want to use minimal effort in frosting cupcakes, you can also use a regular spoon. Scoop frosting out of the bowl and add a dollop to each cupcake. This method will require the frosting to be at room temperature so that it’s soft enough to fall from the spoon. But any way you do it, you really can’t go wrong. (Click on link below for recipe)

PUMPKIN CUPCAKES (OR MUFFINS) WITH CINNAMON CREAM CHEESE FROSTING

Yield: 16 to 18 muffins

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1 1/2 cups light brown or golden brown sugar
4 eggs, room temperature
1 cup vegetable oil
1 can (15 ounces) pumpkin puree
2 tablespoons sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 cup (or more) walnuts or chocolate chips (optional)

For frosting:
1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese, softened
2/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch cloves
5 cups powdered sugar

Optional garnish for cupcakes: ground nutmeg

Procedure:
NOTE: If making cupcakes, start with frosting. If making muffins, skip to step 3.

1. In a large bowl, beat cream cheese, unsalted butter and brown sugar until mixture is light and fluffy, about three to five minutes.
2. Add vanilla, cinnamon and cloves, and slowly beat in powdered sugar one cup at a time, until incorporated. Cover and chill while you make and cool cupcakes.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place muffin cups in muffin tins and set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, combine or sift dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger and cloves.
5. In a large mixing bowl, mix together brown sugar and eggs. Add vegetable oil, pumpkin puree, sour cream, vanilla and zest. Mix until all ingredients are combined.
6. Add half of flour mixture to wet ingredients and mix on low speed until just combined. Repeat with second half of flour mixture. Mix in nuts or chocolate chips if using.
7. Spoon or pour batter into prepared muffin cups, a little over 3/4 full. Bake muffins for 25 minutes or until toothpick inserted in muffins comes out clean. Cool completely before frosting.
8. Using a spoon or knife, spread frosting on the top of each muffin to make cupcakes (You can also use a pastry bag to pipe frosting). Sprinkle tops of cupcakes lightly with nutmeg. Serve.

– Cynthia Furey