Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins #MuffinMonday

These sour cream chocolate chip muffins are sweet but not too sweet, with fluffy insides perfectly complemented by the semi-sweet chocolate chips. Bake a batch for someone you love!

For the relatively transient life that I have led, I have some good friends who have been my friends for a very long time. I was an expat as a small child but we moved to the Houston area when I was going into fourth grade, after my parents divorced.

My father continued with the expat life, always making sure that my sisters and I had bedrooms wherever he lived and his employer always paid for at least one flight a year, when we would spend most of the three months of summer in his latest location. He would have had us year round if he could (always nice to be wanted!) but Mom would never have given us up and he often lived in places where the expat children ended up going to boarding school anyway because of the lack of a good quality local English language school. (Talking to you, Negritos, Peru and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.)

Once again, anyhoo (feel like I have been digressing a lot lately) we moved to Houston, my mother, two sisters and I in the summer between my third and fourth grade years. Mother didn’t think moving back to New Iberia, LA as a young (unwilling, as it were) divorcee was a good idea and I am sure that she was right. Goodness knows the people of the big, progressive city of Houston were judgmental enough. We are talking about the Seventies, folks, and I was one of only two children of divorced parents in my entire fourth grade class of 60 children (two homerooms.) I don’t even want to tell you what those statistics are now but, suffice to say, that there are a lot of families and children in pain out there.

Dear me, but the start of this post is depressing! Let me go on to say that the friends I made in that fourth grade class are still some of my best friends today. Without explanation or excuse, we can get together and, frankly, sometimes act like fourth graders or perhaps 12^th graders because there is often alcohol involved. (Hey, judgers, the drinking age was 18 back then so all of us most of us were legal.)

Last Thursday one of those dear friends was in the hospital recovering from surgery. She was blessed by the presence of her mother, elder son, only daughter and a caring sister I had just missed greeting. I arrived with these muffins for the nurses, so they would take extra good care of her. I would have volunteered to stay the night but she was being ably cared for by her excellently raised daughter, whom I trained briefly in nurse bribery and cajoling. I hung around until the on-call doctor appeared and we got her meds changed from those that were making her sick (there was some discussion of a replacement Jack Daniels IV, which was rejected) and then I handed over the bribery muffins and responsibility, secure that she was in good hands.

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins

If you need people to see things your way or to take care of a loved one, these muffins seem to work pretty well. Also, they are part of Muffin Monday, which is good fun for me. This recipe comes from Taste of Home. Aside from adding more chips, this recipe was made as written because you don’t need to mess with a pretty good thing.

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups or 190g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur Unbleached White Wheat.)
2/3 cup or 132g sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup (8 ounces) or 240ml sour cream
5 tablespoons or 1/3 cup or 70g butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (Original recipe called for 3/4 cup but what’s a 1/4 cup of chocolate between friends? The difference between “I like you a whole lot” and “I love you,” that’s what.)

Method
 Line a muffin tin with paper muffin cups or spray with non-stick spray. Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Mix it around a little and make a little well in the middle.

Combine the egg, sour cream, butter and vanilla.

Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.

Fold in the chocolate chips.

Fill your muffin cups three-fourths full.

Yay! I bought a new muffin tin. I didn't realize how old and grotty mine had gotten till I started taking photos!

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for five minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack.

Enjoy!

You might also be interested in these muffin recipes:
Sheila's Mexican Cornbread
Quick Bread Breakfast Muffins
Banana Bacon Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

White Chocolate Mousse Torte with Fresh Berries

Houston is HOT.  If you are familiar with the proverbial hinges of the gates of hell, we’ve got ‘em here.  Do not touch.  The only upside is the plethora of fresh berries and cherries that are in the grocery stores and markets right now.  We are eating raspberries straight out of the pint boxes like candy.  The other day, we bought 10 half pints for one dollar a piece and I wondered what to make with them.  That first group got eaten in what seemed like a blink, and we’ve gone back for more!  This time, I decided to make a frozen dessert.  Because, who can think about turning the oven on?  (Unless you have to for #MuffinMonday – the sacrifices I make! – another tasty muffin recipe coming to a blog near you soon.)

But on to the sane dessert which requires no oven, save the microwave.

Gram’s Fig Preserves

When figs are in season, make this simple recipe for fresh fig preserves, and enjoy sweet figs all year long! Gram's fig preserves are great spread on a piece of buttered toast, spooned over pound cake or even baked into her special fig spice cake. 

This is a hard post to write without getting maudlin but I will try.  As my handful of Twitter followers and Facebook friends know, we spent last weekend in New Iberia, Louisiana with my aged grandmother. She is 98 1/2 years old which means (thanks to my friend, Jacky’s Gran, who started counting the year she was in at 93, rather than birthdays) she is in her 99^th year. Pretty impressive, I think!

My father and aunt have organized a lovely nurse/caretaker to come in Monday through Friday to care for her while my uncle, who lives with her, is off at work. On the evenings and weekends, he is in charge and is doing a good job. As we said to him, upon questions about the medications, he hasn’t killed her yet, so we figure he knows what he is doing. (Why he didn’t throw us out, I do not know.) Goodness knows, she has two different sets of pills, morning and evening, and if he can keep those straight, more power to him! We are grateful!

We arrived around 3:45 in the afternoon on Friday and her lovely nurse/caretaker, Tina, was still there to greet us. Bless her, then she stayed late just to make conversation and get to know us because her normal hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  She calls my grandmother Ms. Margaret.

Her real name is Marguerite but throughout my childhood, her friends called her Mag or Maggie. On official records, her name is Margaret because when she started school back in 1919, French was forbidden and Marguerite would have been part of that prohibition. Her name was changed to Margaret to conform to the no-French rule. Imagine!

Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother did not learn English till they started school at six years old and the system - and the teachers - tried to stamp it out of them. The shame of that was that the next two generations of Acadiana French children were not allowed to speak their mother tongue at school and gradually it died out. (My grandparents’ generation still spoke it amongst themselves because it is hard to smother a child’s mother tongue.) I think my grandparents’ generation was the last to speak it fluently in Louisiana. I’ve been told that the public schools are teaching French again, but it is not the same. More's the pity.

Anyhoo, Tina got us talking about the character that my grandmother must have been when she was younger and telling stories on her. Oh, my goodness, the stories we could tell. Gram was the best grandmother ever. No was not in her vocabulary. “Gram, can we have some baby aspirin? (They tasted like orange Tic Tacs and we loved them.) The answer was “Sure. Help yourself.”

“Gram, can we borrow your steak knives? We want to have a knife throwing contest in the yard.”  - “You know where they are.”  I don’t even remember her saying, “just be careful.”  But, in fairness, possibly she did. And we lit bonfires, with permission – we mostly did ask, to our credit - and took group bubble baths and climbed trees, higher than was ever safe. And once we even took off walking to my other grandmother’s house a few miles away. Why? Who the heck remembers? Unsupervised much? Blissfully so. 

While cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen this past weekend, I discovered a drawer full of her old cookbooks and asked if I might take them home to look through them more carefully. (Cousins reading this, please know that I WILL RETURN THEM.) You know that the woman who let us take her steak knives in the yard for a knife-throwing contest (which, by the way, ended up with a knife up in my foot and a tetanus shot for yours truly) did not tell me no.  So I have a whole box of mostly cr*p cookbooks with the occasional gem in her handwriting, which is what I am looking for.

I discovered this one before we even left her kitchen.  Written on the front of a Steen Syrup giveaway pamphlet in my grandmother's handwriting. 

“Gram,” I said.  “Is this your recipe for the fig preserves you always made?”  “Yes,” she said.  It couldn’t be more simple.

Gram’s Fig Preserves

It doesn't get any easier than this - just two ingredients - figs and sugar - in a two to one ratio, for a whole lot of wonderful.

Ingredients - to make two pint jars

2.2 pounds or 1 kg or 5 1/2 generous cups of fresh figs

2 3/4 cups or 620g sugar

Method

Rinse the fresh figs well and discard the rinsing water. If your figs have hard stems, cut them off and discard.

Pour the sugar over the drained figs in a heavy-bottomed pot.

Put it on a medium flame, covered. You don't need to add water as this gets really juicy fairly quickly but that is a good thing. Cook for a while, perhaps half an hour, stirring very gently occasionally. You do not want the figs to break up. Gram always had whole figs in her preserve jars and so should you.

After about the first half hour, when all the sugar has dissolved, you can turn the heat up to medium high and take the lid off.  Cook until the syrup reduces by at least half.

Meanwhile, sterilize your jars/lids by pouring boiling water in them.  Then put one metal teaspoon in each jar.  This will keep the jars from breaking when you pour the boiling hot preserves in them.

2 half pint jars and 1 pint jar

When I cooked this down, I got 2 whole pints of preserved figs out of 5 1/2 cups or 1 kilo of figs and 2 3/4 cups or 620g of sugar.

Using a jam jar funnel, divide the figs and boiling syrup evenly between the jars.  Screw the lids on very tightly, with a dry towel and set them upside down.  As they cool, a vacuum seal will form and the preserves will be safe to eat for several weeks.

We bought the fresh figs at the Farmers’ Market on Main Street in New Iberia because Gram’s tree was hit by lightening a number of years ago and her replacement trees (planted with cuttings from my other grandmother’s tree!) are not producing yet. I’ve decided that the best thing I could do was to pack them up nicely and mail them on to her to enjoy. When you are 98 and 1/2, people should be making fig preserves for you. Don’t you agree?

Enjoy!