Carrot Mascarpone Muffins with Mascarpone Filling

A philosophical question for you:  When is a muffin a muffin and not a cupcake?  I do declare that it is when you abstain from adding frosting to it.  Crumbles are acceptable.  And streusel toppings.  And even glaze, but a muffin cannot have thick icing or frosting or whatever you like to call the sweet whipped stuff made with butter and sugar.  Because then it is a cupcake.  I realize this may be pedantic of me, but there you are.  I’ll own it.

Which brings me to this week’s muffin.  My younger daughter requested a carrot muffin because our ingredient this week is mascarpone.  And nothing goes better with carrot cake than cream cheese icing.  But, she knows how I feel about icing on muffins.  (See above.)  So she suggested I add a mascarpone filling.  That girl is a genius and knows the way around her mother.  These were perfect!

Ingredients
6 oz or 170g carrots
1 1/2 cups or 190g flour
3/4 cup or 170g sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt + pinch for filling
8 oz or 226g mascarpone (Divided – half for muffins, half for filling)
1/2 cup or 120ml canola oil
1 egg
1/4 cup or about 30g powdered sugar (for filling)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method
Peel your carrots and cut them into short lengths.  Boil until tender.  Drain and mash with a potato masher until fairly smooth.  Set aside to cool.

Preheat your oven to 375°f or 190°C and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by greasing it or lining the pan with muffin cups.

In a large mixing bowl, combine your flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.

In a small bowl, combine the egg, oil, cooled carrots and half of the mascarpone.  Mix thoroughly.  You will have to mash the mascarpone to get it mixed in.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until just mixed.

Divide the thick batter between the muffin cups in your prepared pan.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Remove the muffins from the pan and cool completely on a rack.

Meanwhile, mix the other half of the mascarpone with the powdered sugar, vanilla and a pinch of salt.  Refrigerate the filling until the muffins are completely cool.

When your muffins are cool, use a sharp knife to cut a circle out of the middle of the muffin.

Lift the core out of the muffin and fill with a small spoonful of the sweetened mascarpone.

Cut the bottom off of the little muffin plug you removed and stuff the top in back on top of the filling.  Eat the pieces you cut off.  Baker’s privilege.  Remark to yourself that those are some fine bits of carrot mascarpone muffin.

Enjoy!  If you are really feeling the need for carrot cake with cream cheese icing, head over here.

Muffin Monday is an initiative by Baker Street, a culinary journey of sharing a wickedly delicious muffin recipe every week.  Drop Anuradha a quick line to join her on this journey to make the world smile and beat glum Monday mornings week after week.  Make sure to go and check out what my fellow bloggers have come up with this week!

Plus learn all you ever need to know about muffins, right here at Muffin 101.

Fennel Potato Mash

My love affair with fennel continues!  Sometimes a new recipe occurs to me because I lack the ingredients for what I wanted to make.  Sometimes it’s because I am feeling lazy and one dish that provides both the starch and vegetable for our meal appeals.  And other times, inspiration strikes when a search through the vegetable bin in my refrigerator turns up an ingredient I had forgotten I’d bought.  This particular dish resulted from all three.  An occurrence I liken to the confluence of the stars.  Because the resultant dish was delicious and fresh.  I hope you like it too.

Ingredients
About 10oz or 285g potatoes
2 medium bulbs fennel
2 generous tablespoons butter (or more, to taste)
1 3/4 oz or 50g freshly grated Parmesan or other hard cheese
Sea salt
Black pepper
Trim the tough green stalks off of the fennel bulbs.  Discard the tough stalks and mince the fronds.  Set aside.

Cut the hard root end off of the bulbs and slice them vertically.

Peel the potatoes and cut them into quarters.   I missed taking a photo of this step but I think you can handle it.

Put the potatoes and the sliced fennel into a pot of water with a teaspoon of salt and heat to boiling on the stove.   Cook until the fennel and potatoes are both fork tender.

Remove from the heat and drain off the water.  With a potato masher, mash the potatoes and fennel until they are as smooth as you normally like your mashed potatoes, adding in the butter and salt and pepper to taste.

Spoon it all into a serving dish.   Mix the Parmesan with the minced fennel fronds and scatter the mixture on top of the mashed potatoes and fennel.

Isn’t that pretty?  And it tastes good too!

Enjoy! 

Jalapeño Cheddar Muffins #MuffinMonday

Anyone who has ever been a new kid in school will understand my overwhelmed feelings the first day I walked into the fourth grade classroom at St. Thomas More back in 1972.  I was nine years old and had been living overseas since I started school.  This Catholic grade school in Houston, Texas was just as foreign.  And I was one of the only children in the whole student body with divorced parents.  An oddity.  Every grade had two homerooms and each homeroom had 30 children.  So many more students than I was used to.  I gradually got to know the other girls and boys in class and joined the Girl Scouts.  I made friends with a small group of girls that are still among my best friends today.  We picked up a few more in high school to round out our gang.

Last weekend, instead of baking these cheesy spicy muffins for posting today, I was celebrating our collective fiftieth birthdays in the party city of New Orleans.   We rented a house in the French Quarter and worked our abs by laughing harder and more often in those three days than I have laughed for years.  There is nothing like a group of friends who know your old secrets and keep them, except when they make a great story when you are all together.

We have so many inside jokes and shared adventures and traditions but one of my favorites is that we always take a photo at each wedding of all the girlfriends with the groom.  Here's the one from our wedding more than 27 years ago.

My sweetie (Isn't he handsome?!) with my beautiful friends.  

And here we all are now.  Seven of us have been friends for more than 40 years!  We just met the immobile girl in the middle.

So, I am baking muffins this morning on actual Muffin Monday and our chosen ingredient is peppers.  If you have been reading along for a while, you know I love spicy things and cheesy makes everything better.  These are perfectly both.

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon English mustard powder
16 oz or 450g extra sharp cheddar
2-3 jalapeño peppers
1-2 Fresno peppers
2 eggs
1 cup or 240ml milk
1/4 cup or 60ml canola

Method
Preheat oven 350°F or 180°C and prepare muffin pan by greasing or lining with paper muffin cups.  When I am baking with cheese, I find that the paper liners stick to my muffins so I usually just grease the pan.  You might want to do the same.

Cut 12 thin slices off of the skinny ends of your peppers and set aside to use for decoration before baking.  Chop the rest of the peppers finely, removing the seeds first, if you don’t like things too spicy.

Grate your cheese.  Set some aside for sprinkling on top of the muffins before baking.

In a large bowl mix together your flour, baking powder, mustard powder and salt.  Add in the big pile of cheese and stir until well mixed.

In a smaller bowl, whisk your milk, canola oil and eggs.

Pour your wet ingredients into your dry ingredients and stir until just combined.

Now fold in the chopped peppers.

Evenly distribute the batter among the muffin cups.

Top with the extra cheese and one slice of pepper per muffin.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes in the pan.

Remove the muffins from the muffin pan and finish cooling on a rack.

Enjoy!