I’ve never really had a grandmother to bake me stuff. I never met my mom’s mom and my dad’s mom was a Persian aristocrat who had a lot of servants to do everything for her. I think she even had one that just carried the bag of rice for when they went on vacation. She really doesn’t know how to cook. Once I made her a grilled cheese sandwich and she couldn’t figure out the ingredients in it.
Because I don’t have any normal grandmothers, I’ve had to compensate by becoming prematurely grandmotherly. One of the ways this has manifested itself has been these prune muffins that I make on occasion. One of the first times I made it, I had to run to Plaid Pantry (a shitty chain of corner stores in the Pacific Northwest) to get some milk. The people in line in front of me were a couple of young women about my age. They were buying a strawberry blunt, presumably to smoke marijuana in or something. I sighed and felt like an old lady. While they were enjoying illicit drugs and acting like normal early-twenty-somethings, I was a going to go back to my house and whip up some muffins with prunes in them.
This recipe is mostly taken from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I just spiced and pruned it up.
PRUNE MUFFINS:
Makes about a dozen.
3 tablespoons melted butter, plus something to grease the muffin tin.
2 cups flour (this recipe is really good with spelt or whole wheat flour.
1/4 cup sugar (or honey)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp on allspice
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 pinch cloves or nutmeg
3 tsp baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk, plus more. What I’ve found is that if want the muffins to be more scone-y use less milk. If you want them to be more fluffy use more milk.
1/2 cup chopped up prunes
1/2 cup walnuts
some extra cinnamon and sugar for making a crunchy top
Baking this mofo:
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Mix all the dry ingredients together. In a separate bowl beat the egg with the butter and milk. Make a whole in the dry ingredients bowl and pour the liquid in in it. Then fold it all together. Try not to over stir. Add more milk if needed. Gently stir in the nuts and prunes.
Spoon the batter into the muffin tin. Sprinkle cinnamon and sugar mixture on top if you want crunchies. Put the tin in the oven and then bake them for about 20-30 minutes. Let cool before taking them out of the tin or they sort of fall apart.
