Plummy Muffins for #MuffinMonday

With lots of sweet purple plums inside, and more pretty plum baked on the outside, these plummy muffins, with a hint of ginger, make a great breakfast or snack.

There are three meanings to the word plummy. First and foremost, as you will imagine, it relates to actual plums and comes from the same root word plume in Old English, borrowed the Old High Germanic pfluma and the Latin prunum. The second meaning, first recorded in the late 1700s is "something desirable." If you’ve ever watched Queen Elizabeth II delivering her annual Christmas message, you will have witnessed the third meaning, and here I quote the Oxford English Dictionary: (Of a person’s voice) having an accent thought typical of the English upper classes.

There is nothing snooty or upper class about these muffins, but the first two definitions certainly apply. Full of plums and highly desirable. Make you some!

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
1/2 cup or 125g raw light brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 small ripe, yet firm, plums (Mine weighed almost 11 oz or 310g total weight.)
1 egg
1/3 cup or 75g butter, melted then cooled
3/4 cup or 175ml milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C. Put liners in a 12-cup muffin pan or grease it well with butter or non-stick spray.

Slice the sides off of your plums and set them aside.  Cut the pits out and chop the rest of the plums in small pieces.

Make three equal three-quarter long cuts in the plum sides, so that you can fan them out on the batter before baking.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, ginger and salt.

In another smaller bowl, whisk together the egg, melted butter, milk and vanilla.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold to combine.  This will be very dry and you should have lots of flour still showing.

Gently fold in your chopped plums.

It looks dry but the chopped plums take care of that in the baking.

Divide batter among muffin cups.   Decorate each with a fanned out plum side.

Bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into center of a muffin comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove from the muffin pan and cool on a wire rack.

Enjoy!