Apologies in advance – this is going to be a very very brief post (for a change!!) as I am due to catch a plane to Berlin very very soon, but I wanted to get my post up before I left… Maki over at I was just really very hungry decreed that the theme for this month’s Is My Blog Burning? event would be cupcakes and muffins – and I leapt at the chance to use my new muffin pan. A very happy coincidence!
Hands up, who has eaten Peppadews?
These are “sweet piquante peppers” with a taste somewhere between a mild chilli and a plain bell pepper. Why did I decide to make muffins with them? Well, because they were discovered in the province where I grew up in South Africa!! Johan Steenkamp came across a chest-high bush of them in the garden of his holiday home in the Eastern Cape. The bush was laden with small bright red fruit something like a cross between cherry tomatoes and very round chillies and voila – the Peppadew pepper was born! They are now commercially grown and are very successfully exported, but remain (like me) a child of Africa. So what better ingredient to choose to include in my muffins?
Here’s the recipe I used, which I got from Naomi’s Cooking:
PEPPADEW AND PARMESAN MUFFINS (makes 12 regular mufffns)
Ingredients:
500 ml (2 cups) cake flour
15 ml (3 teaspoons) baking powder
2,5 ml (1/2 teaspoon) salt
1,25 ml (1/4 teaspoon) ground black pepper
250 ml (1 cup) buttermilk
1 egg
62,5 ml (1/4 cup) olive oil
125 ml (1/2 cup) Parmesan cheese, grated
62,5 ml (1/4 cup) Peppadews, drained and chopped
10 ml (2 teaspoons) fresh thyme leaves
Method:
Preheat oven to 200 ºC (400 ºF). Grease a standard muffin tin.
Sift together the dry ingredients.
Whisk together the milk, egg and oil until smooth. Add the cheese, Peppadews and thyme.
Add to the dry ingredients and stir just until blended.
Spoon into the prepared muffin tin, filling each cup three-quarters full.
Bake for 12 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 3 minutes, then remove and serve with lots of butter.
Let me assure you they are absolutely heavenly – the salty Parmesan is a perfect foil for sweet, tangy slivers of Peppadew and the thyme seems to enhance the flavour of both. Yum yum yum.