Mango Apple Pecan Poppyseed Muffins
In an effort to reproduce the unusual and delightful muffin found at The Red Canoe, a beloved children's bookstore and cafe, I took a guess at the proportions and was fairly happy with the results. Peter's are of course much better than mine, but it was the combo of ingredients that made me unable to resist trying to make them. They are like a stack of baked fruit with a little batter to bind the sweet bits. Mmmmm...I made them February 4, 2010, right before the snows came and we ate them each morning toasted and buttered while contemplating how lucky we were to be snowed in.
fruits, nuts & seeds
1 mango, hunked into pieces about 1" x 1/4"
3 McIntosh apples, peeled, cored, wedged and sliced into 4-6 chunks
2/3 C pecan pieces
2 T poppyseeds
batter
4 T butter, melted
2 C flour
scant 1/4 C sugar
1 1/2 t baking powder
1 t vanilla
1 egg
1 C milk
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- In two separate bowls, prepare mango hunks and apple chunks and set aside.
- Make the batter by stirring together the ingredients in a bowl.
- Add 1/2 of the batter and 1/2 of the pecans to the mango bowl and the remaining 1/2 of the batter and 1/2 of the pecans to the apple bowl. Mix until fruit and nuts are evenly coated.
- Fill muffin tins so that the mango layer is on the bottom and the apple layer is on top. These muffins will not expand like you'd expect of a muffin, but rather, the fruit will bake and soften while retaining its structure, so don't hesitate to pile the apple layer above the top of each tin by about 1" or so. Proportionally, the measurements worked out to be about 1/2 tin for the mango layer and 2/3 tin for the apple layer).
- Top each muffin with a generous dusting of poppyseeds.
- Bake at 400 for 40 min or so.
Comments
Also, if I were reading this recipe, I'd probably be tempted to skip the poppyseeds, which I'm usually kind of lukewarm about and wouldn't bother to buy normally. But they were very important to the amazing originals and I am sure to these too, and not to be missed.