Easy Muffins : Banana Muffins and Mango Muffins

Gedong Gincu Mango Muffins

First, I am sorry for not being able to write and update this blog in the last (ok, let me count...) 2 months... yes, in fact, more than 2 month!! Time flies. Doesn't mean I didn't cook thou. But not as many, since I spent most of my days traveling out of Jakarta for work. And the worst was.., from the only few cooking I did in between the trips, I kept forgetting to take pictures before I ate them or gave them away to friends and family. This time, I am going to share what I learned about muffins.

Banana Muffins with Coconut Milk and Palm Sugar

Muffins...

Easy and fast, require only one big bowl, one smaller bowl, one spatula, measuring cups and spoons... that's all! and you can have endless combination of flavors in about 40 minutes. Ten minutes of measuring and mixing, and 30 minutes of baking (20 minutes if you make mini muffins).

I tried to simplify the recipes, with only few basic ingredients so you can have almost freedom for adding the flavor you prefer. I hope you find it useful, and give you more confidence to cook muffins without recipe. Well, actually, not really without recipe.. all you have to do is remembering the two big rules about muffins : flour/baking powder ratio and flour/liquid ratio. Then you can add other ingredients according to your taste preference.

 

 Gedong Gincu Mango Muffins, so much flavor in one bite...

However, with different combination of fruits, nuts, or other flavors, you might need to adjust the ratio. Some people have their own standard on how the perfect muffins should be, the batter and the muffins' consistency, etc. But if you are like me, who is baking simply for fun and enjoy your friends and family eating your muffins with fun, then you can try my principles in baking muffins.

Baking powder

It's the key. You can't make muffins without baking powder. It's the leavening agent so muffins will be softer, lighter, crumble, with the airier texture. If you use self-rising flour, forget the baking powder and forget the ration of flour/baking powder also, since self-rising flour already contains baking powder.

In general, use 1 - 2 tsp baking powder for every cup of flour.

Flour

I use low protein flour (cake flour) or simply use all-purpose flour. Do not use bread flour. For muffins, we want to avoid gluten.

Other type of starch such as whole wheat, rolled oats, etc. can be used also.

Liquids

Usually there are several kinds of liquid used for muffins

• Milk / yoghurt / butter milk / heavy cream / water
• Oil / melted butter
• Eggs
• Or sometimes you might want to use honey to sweeten your muffins

The flour/liquid ratio, or the final dough consistency... not too liquid, yet not too stiff is important too. Hmm, how can I give the right description so you would know and understand. Hmmm..., let me think.

Well, describing consistency is apparently much harder than I thought. Well, it should be like a sticky dough. If you prefer a moist muffin, then you can add a little bit more liquid. In general, 1.5 cups of flour for 2.5 cups of liquids. Adjust the ratio according to the other ingredient or flavor you use.

 

Sweetness and/or saltiness

For sweetness, usually I use granulated sugar... could be white sugar, brown sugar, palm sugar, or any other granulated sugar. Sometimes I prefer honey in a certain recipe, so I count the honey to the total liquid. But for granulated sugar, I do not count it for the total dry ingredient... only flour counts.

To balance the sweetness, it's better to add a pinch of salt to the mixture. Don't forget to adjust the amount of sugar if you make muffins with fresh fruits that have high sugar content (mango, cherries, etc.) or candied/glazed fruits. Usually, I use 1/4 - 1/3 cup of sugar for every cup of flour. For savory muffins, use only 1-2 tablespoon of sugar for every cup of flour.

Flavors

Always keep in mind the water content in whatever flavor you choose for your muffins, especially for fresh fruits. Different fruits have different water contain. Usually, softer fruit (strawberry, ripe peach, pineapple, mango, papaya, fresh orange, berries, pineapple, cherries, etc.) has more water, so adjust the total liquid a little bit. No adjustment if you use dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, dried plum, dried cranberry, etc.), even after you soak and strain them).

Nuts are often mixed in for flavor and for giving nice texture in muffins.

For salty flavors, use cheeses, bacon, meat, etc. Simply reduce the sugar as I mentioned before.

Mixing method

Actually, there are several mixing method for muffins. But for this time, I will use the easiest method.

Mix well the dry ingredients in a bigger bowl, and wet ingredients in a smaller bowl. Then pour the liquid into the dry mixture. 

If you use fresh fruit, nuts, cheese, etc. as flavoring, mix them in to the dry ingredient just before pouring the liquid in or at the same time with the liquid.

Using spatula or wooden spoon, mix just to combine. Do not over-mix, or the gluten will formed and you will not get a soft cake-like muffins.

Now go ahead and make your muffins experiment with whatever flavor you like.

Or, if you want to try some of my recipe: Banana Muffins with Coconut Milk and Palm Sugar, and Mango Muffins...

Mango Macarons

Yes, still on macarons.. seems that I would never get rid of the bugs. This time... flavored with mango. I see that mango will be in season soon; well, it's already started. Since it's a native plant, we can find so many varieties... with name or without name. The one without name, of course the least desired... sour and fibrous. Only a few people like them, including me. Well, basically I like mangos whatever the taste... sour, sweet, juicy, or fibrous... doesn't really matter to me. My husband has his own names for different mangos he can find in the market... common mango (Harum Manis; easy to find everywhere), starchy mango (Indramayu) , fragrant fibrous mango (Kweni), aromatic mango (Gedong Gincu), yellow mango (Manalagi), sour mango (Semar), and so on and so on, which sometimes confuse me... and confuse himself! for there are too many varieties. Yes, as a foreigner in this country, all those local names are too difficult for him to remember; he named them based on their characteristics. Sometimes, in fruit stores, we can find imported mangos from Thailand or from Australia. But of course we like our mangos better, the local varieties have richer flavor than those imported one, and much cheaper too. I often wonder what kind of people buy those imported mangos...

In the office, Atiah brought some green mangos almost every week. She has one mango tree in her front yard... a Gadung mango tree... what a blessing.

My favorite mangoes are Gedong Gincu, Harum Manis, and green mango (unripe mango) from whatever variety. I also love Kesturi mango from Kalimantan. I used to eat Kesturi mango in my childhood when we lived in South Kalimantan. That was in 1970's. Kesturi mango is endemic plant in that province. In every mango season, my Mom and Dad went to villages in South Kalimantan looking for this particular kind of mango, and would buy them directly from the tree. It's so aromatic and sweet, small size around 7cm long and 5cm thick, and so fibrous. The skin is dark purplish green, covers the dark orange fibrous flesh. Since it's so fibrous, not many buy and plant Kesturi, and it becomes more and more difficult to find. In 1980's the local government tried to promote this endemic plant, but not much has been achieved until now. Kesturi is still hard to find. Gedong Gincu is aromatic but not as aromatic as Kesturi, and less fibrous.

To flavor macarons, I need the most aromatic mango I can find, which is Gedong Gincu. Last week I oven-dried some Gedong Gincu mango (see my post on oven-dried fruits), which the flavor I love so much. It was so intense! I process some in my food processor,  trying to make powdered mango. But I couldn't make it fine, so it looked more like mango bits. Maybe I didn't dry it enough. Never mind. I mixed 25 grams of it in the almond-powdered sugar mixture, and resulted in macawrongs... 
This is the pictures... they look perfect, but... I trick you! they have big air pockets!!

See the big airpocket under the surface?

Yes, those mango bits inside the macarons shells were not dry and fine enough. Taste-wise? yummy! and sooooo mango!

The next batch was plain macarons colored in orange, with some mango bits on top of the shells. They look nice, with just enough Gedong Gincu flavor from the mango bits. To add more mango flavor, I decided to make the filling using Gedong Gincu mango puree,  mixed with swiss-meringue buttercream. Yum. Love the flavor a lot. Next time, I will take care on oven-drying the mango, make sure it's really dried and fine, and see how it will end up with.

Oven-dried fruits

For me, baking macarons is like playing a fun game. Yes, tons and tons of fun! In one of my post, I promised to share with you the method I use for drying fruits. The idea was started when I wanted to bake Tartelette's Powdered Strawberry and Vanilla Bean Macarons. In this country, powdered strawberry is not available in the market, so buying one is not an option. Before that, I read Tartelette's post on Carrot Cake Macarons, and got my inspiration from there, knowing that fruits or vegetables can be dried in an oven. I quickly went to web-search on how to dry fruits and vegetables.. and found several methods for drying fruits or vegetables. Most of the articles on the web that I read were explaining how to dry fruits or vegetables using an electrical food drier, which I don't have and would be difficult to find in this country. It's a much easier method of course. But I was interested only to dry fruits and vegetables using oven. One method that I know I can do for this time being.

After reading more than ten articles about how to oven-dry fruits and vegetables, I could grasp some basic principles on how to do it properly and to maintain the flavor. In fact, the flavor becomes more intense when it is dried.

The initial reason to dry fruits was to flavor my macarons shells with different powdered fruits... but since I know how to dry fruits using my oven, I do it often, simply to have a healthy snacks in my jars. So, instead of munching on a bag of potato chips, why not munching on a small bowl of dry-fruit chips? Yum...