BB: Coffee Crumb Cake Muffins

Baked 11/12/2014

Having a new cookbook arrive just as I finished a major work project and as the pre-Thanksgiving food obsession started had me turning to The Baking Bible for every proposed baking. I picked out this recipe as my first to try after the book arrived. Looked simple, relatively...but there were a number of steps. I ended up with a dishwasher full of dishes, too--now I'm recalling the first RLB bakethrough. We're back!

These muffins are a coffee cake with a walnut-crumb topping, a little of a walnut-crumb filling folded into the batter, and sliced apple baked in the batter. They are baked in "Texas sized" muffin pans, which for some reason I seem to have 4 of. Must look back at the Heavenly Cakes list and see if that's when I bought 'em.

Details: I used White Lily bleached AP flour instead of digging the real cake flour from the bottom of the freezer. Dark brown sugar, because I've decided my taste buds will never tell the difference between that and Muscovado, and I can't find Muscovado at the DeKalb Farmer's Market any more. They do have superfine sugar, though, so I'll use that when called for. Right now I'm working on the lot I had at the end of Heavenly Cakes, I bet, and sifting it to get the lumps out. I had a largish Granny Smith apple so any rings sliced from it would be far too large for the muffin tins, so I just sliced it. I only needed a bit of it to lay one layer of apple in each muffin cup, so plan on eating a good bit of even a small apple.

My liberties:
--My 2 egg yolks were only 30 g., so I added more sour cream to get to 36 g. I suspect that 6 g. wouldn't make a lot of difference if I'd left it out altogether.
--The recipe calls for portioning out the plain batter into the 6 muffin liners, sprinkling on the filling mix of walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon, then folding it in each cup. I folded the filling lightly into the bowl of batter all at once.
--The idea is to lay apple rings or slices on the batter, press down a bit so the batter rises around it, then smear the batter over the apple. My apples were juicy or else still had lemon juice on them, so the batter clung to my fingers or the spatula and wouldn't spread over the apple. 'S OK, the apples seem to have gotten covered by the batter during baking anyway.

I should have pre-chopped the walnuts before putting them the food processor with the other filling/topping ingredients--by the time the big chunks were reduced, much of it was almost ground. My resulting crumb topping was not crumbly but in large lumps, so instead of pressing some of it together to make lumps, I had to break it apart to get some crumbs.

Taste test: the nephew collected 4 of the 6 for himself and sister-in-law, and I kept 2 for breakfasts. The texture was lovely, light and fluffy, and moist with the apple helping here. A very nice start to baking through The Baking Bible.