For those of you who want to read this blog regularly, I’d suggest checking every weekend — that’s when I do the majority of my cooking/baking.
This morning I made one of my favorite recipes, pumpkin ginger raisin muffins. These are based on yet another recipe from Simply Recipes. But because I’m allergic to nuts and prefer to bake with whole wheat flour, I changed a few things. They’re really moist and gingery (is that a word?), since they contain both ground ginger and candied ginger. My recipe is as follows:
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Pumpkin ginger raisin muffins/loaf
Preheat oven to 350°F
Put 1 cup of raisins in a small bowl and cover with very warm water. Allow them to soak for about 5 minutes as you mix the ingredients, then drain them. I always do this when I bake with raisins — it keeps them moist and juicy so you don’t end up with chewy hockey pucks.
Mix the following in a bowl:
- 1 c canned pumpkin
- 1/3 c melted butter
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1/4 c water
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp allspice
- 1 tsp ground ginger
In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients:
- 1/2 c unbleached white flour
- 1 c whole-wheat flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 c sugar
- 1 tsp baking soda
(I’m actually lazy and don’t like washing multiple bowls, so sometimes I just do this on top of the wet ingredients. But in baking, that’s generally bad form. Also, I haven’t tried making this with all whole-wheat flour, but it’d probably be fine — they might just be a little bit denser).
Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, just until incorporated. Fold in 2 Tbsp chopped candied ginger (another of my favorite ingredients — you can find it in the spice section. It’s also great in cobblers and fruit salad) and the drained raisins.
Spoon into a greased or lined muffin tin and bake 25-30 mins or until a toothpick comes out clean. [Variation: to make this into a loaf instead, just use a loaf pan and bake longer, about 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean).
Makes 10-12 muffins (depending on how large you make them) or 1 loaf.
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This recipe is pretty flexible, because I realized this morning that I used the wrong dry measuring cup and so only added 2/3 cup sugar and 1 c total of flour. It didn’t really seem to make a difference, except making the muffins extra moist!
I’m currently in the process of making a sourdough pizza crust using my “wild” starter, so stay tuned for the pizza post…
