I hear you chant. But it’s hard not to adopt the properties of your environment. You are the sum of the people and places you most interact with, and for me, that’s food, and foodies. Especially, baked food, and bakers.
I love it, love baking. From Bara Brith to Brown, cookies to crackers, they’re all equally fascinating. Better yet, I just happen to live in this particular period of history where inspiration, thanks to the internet, is everywhere
But let’s take off our rose tinted glasses or a second, shall we?
The internet is a monopoly. Quite a bold statement when discussing something that’s accessible to all, but it’s true. It’s a monopoly on inspiration.
Pumpkin Spice Latte
Avocado Toast
Tapas!
If we look back at recent years, we’ll see that if anything, anywhere get’s popular fast enough, it’s popular everywhere. It’s the nature, and power of the internet. Just like the economic Market, the intellectual stock of the internet is chaotic and unpredictable. Topics prone to huge peaks and crashes in popularity, for no reason other than luck and the nature of popularity.You can’t predict when the next peak will come, just that it will.Thus we have our trends, and just like the stock market, these trends are rarely stay on just our screens.
Oh no.
They’ll seep out it seems, through the Wi-Fi, into our everyday physical lives. No one is safe, from schools full of flossers (‘no, that’s not a slur, it’s a thing) to a yodeling kid being played in my car, and of course, coffee shops. Whatever’s decorating the walls of Instagram and Pinterest, that’s what you’re getting at your local #TrendyCafe.
Hence the Cruffins.
Cruffins are the amalgamation of muffins and crumble. Nobody knows when or where they were first discovered, just that they were and are now everywhere. In my jumping-on-the-bandwagon defense, this is not my first time re-designing a crumble. Having said that, these Cruffins were basically lifted straight out of the Starbucks cake catalogue.Or at least taken from my girlfriend who described what she’d had a t Starbucks.Originality aside, these were still delicious Cruffins (and a perfect excuse for playing with toffee for future fun projects),
With that, I present my very own crumble top muffins; my Cruffins (bring all the boys to the yard?)
For variation I decided to trial two different flavour combinations, as well as making some crumble-less muffins for comparison. One set of were toffee apple cruffins, with cooked apples mixed through the muffin batter and a toffee stuffed in the center for a melt in the middle type thing. The other was a more understated, blueberry lemon affair, with blueberries stuffed into the middle of the lemon zested batter, again for a molten center type vibe.
Recipe
Preparing the Ingredients
Toffee
Heat the sugar in saucepan over a medium heat until it melts, turning a deep amber.
This is the process of making caramel, with the sweet spot between burnt and under-cooked being the point just after the sugar starts to smoke
200g of white sugar
Add half the sugar’s weight in cream to the pan and stir in vigorously (careful of the scalding steam it’ll initially spit at you)
100 double cream
Heat the mixture up again to 118±2°C
This is the hard ball stage which is ideal for making chewy caramels. If you don’t have a thermometer, eyeball it by dripping some caramel into a glass of cold water and giving the cooled caramel a feel. You want it to hold it’s shape but still be somewhat malleable.
Pour the hot toffee mixture into a small tin lined with baking paper and let it cool completely
You want the tine to be small enough so that the toffee sets to a reasonable thickness, you want Thorntons thick caramel here, not Curly-Wurly thick 😛
Apples
Peel, core and dice your apples into chunks
Size depends on your preference but most people would prefer not to eat massive chunks of apple in their muffins.Alternatively, you could use some dried apples, which is better for you batter consistency as they won’t release excessive amount of moisture when baked.
5-6 apples depending on size (you’ll want them to way around 200g once peeled, cored and chopped)
Dust apple chunks with some cinnamon, cover and microwave until softened ( ~ 90 eiliad )
200g diced apple
Set apples aside
The microwave is good for releasing some of the apples’ stored water, so draining them should prevent your muffins from baking up soggy.
Crumble Topping
Whenever I make a crumble, I usually go fro equal parts of flour, oats, butter and sugar as a good rule of thumb/go to recipe. The measurements below should be enough for the amount of muffins you’ll be making.
Melt the butter (stove or microwave)
100g butter
Add flour, oats and sugar to the butter and mix to form a crumbly…crumble
100g floru
100g oats
100g sugar of your choosing (soft, light, granulated, dark, whatever you fancy)
Set crumble aside, you can now move on to the muffin mix
The Muffin Mix
This recipe make 12 muffins, although you’re more than welcome to double up if you have the trays.If only to use up a full 3 eggs instead of only one and a half (wastage like that is what keeps me up at night)!
Mix all dry ingredient together in a large mixing bowl
300g flour
225g caster sugar
15g baking powder
2.5g salt
Whisk egg, oil and milk together in a jug
150g milk
120g vegetable oil
75g of egg (whisk 2 eggs together and weigh out what you need…or double the recipe to use spot on 3 eggs)
Whisk wet ingredients into the dry mixture.
Don’t over mix here. Whisk gently, just enough to knock out all those lumps but not so much that you start developing gluten. Nobody likes a tough muffin.
Baking the Cruffins
With everything prepped you can now start flavouring and assembling the cruffins.
For toffee apple cruffins, stir the cooked apples into the muffin mix. For the blueberry lemon ones, zest one lemon into the mix
200g apple diced and cooked
OR
zest of 1 lemon
Spoon the muffin batter into a muffin tray lined with cases
Fill the cases to about half or two thirds full. You can fill the headspace with crumble mix later…or just go nuts, fill them right up and enjoy the mess later
Place one toffee in the center of each apple muffin and about 3 blueberries in the center of the lemon zested mix
toffees cut into 1cm cubes from cooled toffee mixture
OR
blueberries, about 50g should do
Finish the cruffins by filling the remaining space in each case with crumble mix
Be generous with your crumbling here, the batter tends to gobble up the crumble (faster than even you can)
400g crumble mix
Bake at 180°C (15 mins)
Enjoy your freshly baked, #basic Cruffins.
More Stuff
If you’ve enjoyed playing with the old crumble concept, be sure to check out my re-imagined tarte aux pommes recipe, which is basically an upside down apple crumble. If it’s something more scientific your after though, there will be an article on how fat and temperature manipulation affects the texture of caramel in the future. Some definite nuggets for your sugar-crafting repertoire there.
