Blue Corn Berry Muffins

Well, I had to do it. I had to make something else in the muffin tin to see if it was totally bitched.

And one of the small veggie places that seems to specialize in local and as-close-as-possible foods had giant vats of blueberries on sale. So of course, blueberry muffins. And blueberry smoothies. And blueberries with yogurt and granola...

Just the muffins in this post.

Now, those of you who've never seen me in meatspace propbably don't know that I have some issues with colour. For a lot of years I wore a lot of black because I'm just not good at matching things. Warm colours? Cool colours? Wut? Eventually I gave up and just started wearing green pants with a blue tshirt and red sneakers. Monochormatic outfits are my friend.

And so I decided to make blueberry muffins using blue masa. Monochromatic breakfasts.

Don't worry, Canada Customs didn't know what blue masa was either when I brought it back across the border.

Masa is nixtamalized cornmeal. It's cornmeal treated with an alkali in order to make the vitamins in the cornmeal available. It also make the proteins in corn usable by humans. And if you mix corn, squash, and beans in one dish, you end up with a perfectly complete source of protein.

Of course blue masa is just masa made from blue corn. If you've never had it, it's totally awesome. Tastes mostly the same, but dude! It's freaking blue!

Think about it... naturally occuring blue stuff is pretty rare. Even moreso is naturally occuring blue food.

Blue Corn Blue Berry Muffins

What You Need

• 2 c blue masa
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 c cream and or milk
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 c honey
• 1/2 c melted butter
• plus a bit more butter for greasing the muffin tin
• blueberries!

What you gotta do:

So, we're going to start this off by souring our cream and or milk. If you have buttermilk, use it, and skip this step. I never have buttermilk. For some reason the smallest container I can find of it is 1 litre, and I will never use 1 L of buttermilk before it manages to go bad. Hell, half the time I can't use a litre of regular milk before it sours.

You can sour your milk / cream by adding lemon juice to it.

Then, in your biggest bowl, combine all the dry ingredients and add the lemon zest.

The rest of this goes pretty quickly, so preheat your oven to 400 and melt some butter to grease your muffin tin (or line it with papers).

To your soured cream, add the vanilla and honey.

1/4 cup isn't a lot of honey, no. But you'll be loading these muffins with super sweet berries so you don't really need the sugar sweetness. You can add more if you'd like, but these work for me.

Plus, if you only use 1/4 cup in the batter you have an excuse to drizzle the muffins with honey when you eat them. ;)

Add the eggs and the melted butter. 

Beat this liquidy stuff all together and then pour it into the dry stuff.

Mix the two until they're just combined and then dump in the berries. At least 2 cups.

Fold the blueberries in gently and then fill your cups with them.

You should be able to generously fill all 12 spots with fabulously blue batter.

Bake them for about 20 minutes, but maybe start checking around 18. You don't want these overdone. Cornbread can seem really dry if it's overbaked.

Nothing a little butter and honey won't solve though.

Full of explodey blue goodness.

Let them cool a good 10 minutes in the pan before you try extracting them. If your pan is fine, you should have no problems.

Mine was not. They totally stuck to the sides and the bottom. Just as bad as the quiches did. Pan is bitched.

But, I'm damn good at getting stuck things out of pans, and with my trusty paring knife and spoon, I was able to do this.

Not pretty, but it's out.

These are best eaten the day they were made, as with all cornbread, but if you do package and freeze them, just remember to bring along some butter and honey to go with them.

I've got honey in my desk drawer at work.

What have you got stashed in your drawers at work?

nuts to that

Is it chocolate or is it a nut?

I had a request for cookies with white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts in them. I've heard of this combo before but I'm not really fond of chunky bits of nuts in my cookies so I've never bothered with them. But they asked, and so I make.

I figured though, if I'm going to fill a cookie with these pale bits of stuff, it needs to be something other than a typical drop cookie. So I decided to make a super chocolately brownie style cookie.

Reverse Chocolate Macadamia Nut Chip Cookies

What you need:

• 8 ounces unsweetend chocolate
• ¼ c butter
• 1 ½  cup sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour (I used 2 cups. DON'T do that; it's too much)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup white chocolate chips
• 1 c chopped macamadamia nuts

What you gotta do:

Okay, first off, I used too much flour. I made mine with a full 2 cups and they didn't spread at all as they baked, and they were a little crumblier than I'd hoped for. So, I'm thinking that if you reduce it to 1 1/2 cups, they should have a better shape and texture.

Melt the chocolate and butter together in the microwave. Start with a minute and a half at 50% power, stir, and then a minute at 50% power, stir. You don't want the chocolate to melt entirely in the microwave. Don't worry, the residual heat will get rid of the rest of the chunks.

In a big bowl, mix the eggs and sugar together.

Add the vanilla and the melted chocolate to the big bowl. Stir until it's lovely and dark and glossy.

I had thought I'd be able to bash the macamadamia nuts in the bag they came in with the bottom of the baking powder jar to break them up. Didn't work.

So, chopping them with a knife. They're a much softer nut than say an almond or a pecan, and they seem to shave better than they chop. mmm shaved nuts.

If you feel like sifting the flour, baking powder, and salt before you add it to the big bowl, go right ahead. I didn't. I just piled it all on top (srsly, don't use this much flour) and gave it a bit of a premix before I mixed it all in.

Yay, flour. I was having a seriously spilly kinda of day.

Yup, definitely too much flour.

It all mixed in though... there are times when chocolate really just isn't very photogenic.

Add the nuts and the white chocolate chips to the dough.

Now, if you only used 1 1/2 cups of flour, chilling the dough before you scoop it onto the baking sheet will probably work well to give you a nice soft cookie. Mine though retained their shape a little too well after chilling. So, I left the dough on the counter after the second round.

It didn't help much. There are some things that just can't be fixed, and too much flour in your cookie dough is one of them.

Good enough. They're chocolate, there's lots of them, and though the texture is a little less than ideal, they don't taste half bad. You could do this with bittersweet chocolate, but then they'd be too sweet to eat more than 3 or 4 at a time.

Bake them at 325 for 10 minutes and let them cool on a rack before you pack them up to take to work. Or pile them onto a plate to eat in bed.