Molasses Muffins

W. Crawford is off on a "little" 200k brevet today. A brevet is a long, long bike ride. The big ones take several days; you pedal on the uphill and sleep on the downhill. The main thing is that it's a self-sufficient ride. You have to haul your own snacks, your rain gear, your spare tubes, just like in real life. Once when I was very impressionable I saw a picture of a big colorful bike race. There was a guy in a car leaning out to peel back a cyclist's spandex shorts and squirt some lube down there for him. Nothing like that happens in a brevet.

My job was to pack enough snacks to sustain my randonneur for the ten hour ride (he can stop for a meal, if he feels like it). In lieu of squeezable goo-drinks and other high-tech, entirely artificial food for performance athletes, I sent him off with a stash of well-buttered rye molasses muffins, a quarter pound of cheese, and dates filled with coconut and sea salt.

I'm not just being flippantly anachronistic. These molasses muffins make excellent fodder for heavy exercise. By my calculations, W. Crawford needs nearly 9000 calories today. Exercise particularly drains magnesium, zinc, copper, and iron. If he eats all the (well-buttered) muffins I sent, he'll have 2000 calories right up front, plus 150% of the RDA for magnesium, and 75% of his copper, zinc, and iron. (Along with 500% of his daily manganese requirements, wtf?) If you include the chopped liver he had for breakfast and the righteous supper he'll no doubt have, this is one well-fueled randonneur. Don't worry; I only run the numbers when they're interesting ones, like "9000 calories."

That said, these muffins are dark, chewy, and moist, even if all the exercise you get is grinding grain. That grainy rye flavor is a marvelous (and appropriately subtle) foundation for something as deep and mineral as molasses. Rye flour has less gluten than wheat -- and less of a tendency to toughen -- but still keeps stuff stuck together. The oat flour keeps the muffins from spreading. Substitute quick oats or white flour if you have none.

I particularly like these with a glass of kefir.

Rye Molasses Muffins

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 cups freshly ground rye flour
1/2 cup oat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cloves

In another bowl, whisk together
1 egg
2/3 cup molasses
1 cup buttermilk, sour milk, yogurt, kefir, or (water plus a tablespoon of vinegar)

Put 1/4 cup butter in a small saucepan and melt it over medium heat. Let it brown lightly; remove from heat. Stir the liquids into the dries, pour in the butter, and combine. Cover with a plate and let it sit for the afternoon.

Spoon batter into greased muffin cups and bake at 375 for half an hour or until a knife comes out clean.

Molasses Cookies with L33T Sauce

While the Reed math department hunkered down around a case of PBR and blew up each others' dirigibles, I hid out in the kitchen with some bourbon and a hankering for moist, sweet-salty molasses cookies. Like most good clean fun, the LAN party required more set-up than play time -- but it seems to have the same appeal as cookie dough and dominoes and novels about long, tedious courtships. I'm still not entirely sure what L33t Sauce is, but I think it has something to do with PBR. Or maybe it's a cool, tart glass of kefir, which pairs marvelously with soft cookies -- coating them without penetrating to their already-tender interiors. Crunchy or firm cookies are still better in milk.

In any case, these cookies were so good that I made another batch this morning before breakfast.

Savory Molasses Cookies
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Thinly slice and lay out to soften:
12 tablespoons butter

Whisk together:
2.25 cups flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
3/4 tsp. salt

Cream the butter with:
1 cup brown sugar.

You can beat it on medium with a mixer. While I have nothing against mixers in theory, in a quick little recipe like molasses cookies I find them a bit clunky. All that plugging-in, and hunting for the beaters, and washing the beaters, and then the server crashes again and everybody dies. Instead, I go all primal and knead the butter and sugar together with my (clean) fingers. The benefits are manifold, but the best is that there really is no commercial moisturizing product quite like creamed butter and sugar. The sugar crystals gently exfoliate and energize your tired skin, while the butter cools, conditions, and seals in moisture. Knead lavishly.

Then whisk in:
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 cup dark molasses

Whisk until lightish and fluffy. Add the dry ingredients, mix until just combined, and shape into 1.5" balls. Roll the balls in a little bit of white sugar to make them sparkly and arrange on a parchment-lined cookie sheet about two inches from each other. Ooh, you could even add a sprinkle of coarse sea salt to the rolling-sugar, and reduce the salt in the dough. Bake till the cookies are lightly fissured on top, pull them from the oven, and let them cool just a bit on the cookie sheet before removing them to a cooling surface (rack, flattened paper bag, your mouth) and popping the next trayful in the oven. Even leaving them on the cookie sheet too long can darken them: the key to gooey molasses delight is minimal baking.

I remembered to call Mama this morning but n00blike totally forgot that I'd just put the last batch in the oven. pWnage.

All the Honey-Ginger Buttercream a Birthday Can Handle

Apologies. I got gusted up in the fall breeze and dropped in the middle of the brussel sprout harvest on a coastal California farm where I went on an unchecked pie-baking spree. The leaves fell and I was whisked home in time to move all my worldly possessions to yet another house before I was utterly incapacitated by the generous gift of a lovely old sewing machine. I spent days engrossed in anachronistic craftiness before I looked up in the middle of threading the bobbin to realize I hadn't yet unpacked so much as a sock. So I busied myself bulding a cozy fort in the basement nook that was to be my room, and before I even caught my breath it was time to bake a birthday cake.

I don't generally like cake. I like pies and cookies -- moist, rich, chewy things, not dry overly-sweet crumbly things. I was mulling over the cake problem as I chewed thoughtfully on a chunk of ginger root one morning (ginger is a stimulating and salutary habit I've recently developed). And suddenly I knew the cake I wanted, its flavor and texture wafted to me on the golden wings of a ginger-dream.

Molasses Cake with Honey-Ginger Buttercream

Prep: Set out 16 eggs, two and a quarter pounds (9 sticks) of unsalted butter, and a quart of soured milk (or fresh milk + 2 T. vinegar). Butter and flour two 9 or 10" cake pans (2" deep, at least) and a 9 x 13" baking dish. I have a woefully underequipped kitchen, aside from my cast iron treasures; so I used my glass-bottomed springform pan and the old #9 skillet. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.


In one very large bowl, whisk together 8 c. all-purpose flour, 3 tsp. baking soda, 4 tsp. salt, 2 T. ground cinnamon, 1.5 T. ground ginger (I ran out and had to use part fresh ginger, which worked fine), 1 tsp. ground cloves, and 2 c. oat bran. Yes, bran. Not because birthday cake should be healthy -- because that's silly -- but because it should be moist and chewy. Moist chewiness is the particular province of oat bran, not wheat or others, so don't substitute.

In another large bowl, cream 1 lb. butter and add 10 eggs, 3 c. molasses, and 1 qt. sour milk. Add the liquids to the dries, mix it all thoroughly but not excessively, pour the batter into the pans and spread it evenly. Bake about 45 minutes, till a knife comes out clean.

The cake can sit out, covered with plates or plastic, for a day at least, and stays plenty moist. When the cakes are entirely cool, loosen them from the pan-sides, invert the pans onto a cookie sheet, and rap them smartly till the cakes fall out. Trim off any unevenness and make the skillet-cake a little smaller and straight-sided. They are ready to frost and serve.

Honey-Ginger Buttercream

This buttercream can be prepared a few days in advance or just before use. Since the ingredients are so few, the honey must be exquisite and the butter perfect. Bring 1" of water to a simmer in a large, deep skillet. Separate the remaining six eggs, stashing the yolks in the fridge for custard or somesuch and keeping the whites in a metal bowl. Add 1 c. honey, and maybe a pinch of cream of tartar if you have it on hand (I didn't). Whisk till well-blended. Place the metal bowl in the skillet of water and immediately start beating it - at first on low, gradually raising the speed as the whites fluff. When the whites are glossy and form soft, curled peaks, remove the bowl from the heat but continute beating till the whites have cooled a bit (3 minutes or so). Beat in 1 tsp. vanilla and 1/2 tsp. salt.

In another large bowl, beat 5 sticks butter till fluffy and creamy. Add the egg white-honey mixture incrementally to the butter, beating thoroughly between additions. Now it is time for the ginger. I am still not exactly certain how much ground ginger I added, but I'll wager it was at least a tablespoon, and maybe two. The issue here is that the butter mellows out the ginger bite -- so you'll have to add more than you think you should. Taste and adjust, taste and adjust. You should have a fluffy frosting that sweeps in with a rich honey-butteriness and finishes with a warm ginger zing.


Pack the cakes in your backpack (they're sturdy; they'll be fine!) along with the frosting and bike 20 blocks to the birthday house. Assemble the cake on site just like in the picture. There will be just enough frosting for the two round layers and the back-up 9 x 13" cake, provided you don't eat too much in the process.

Blackstrap

My blood hasn't been rich enough lately for the vampires, who favor salty & ironic flavors. So today I bought myself a bottle of Plantation blackstrap molasses -- while wondering what marketing manager was naive enough to think the name Plantation wasn't, at the very least, encumbered with much too heavy a load of historical baggage.

Blackstrap molasses -- according to Everyday Foods, and my mother's copy of Joy, and Harold McGee, too -- is better for fattening cattle than feeding to people. It's the final by-product of sugar production. After cane syrup has been boiled and evaporated down three times, dark sticky mineral-rich blackstrap is left behind. What primarily interests me is the fact that 1 tablespoon has 20% of your recommended daily iron intake, plus calcium, potassium, magnesium, and chromium (do keep in mind that iron from vegetable sources isn't as readily absorbed as that from animal sources). The flavor has all the rich intensity of the deep caramelization found in roasted coffee, seared meats, licorice, and dark chocolate, along with a downright metallic zing of particular interest to the bloodthirsty anemics among us. I put blackstrap on ice cream, cornbread, pumpkin pie, porridge, sweet potatoes, yogurt, and bananas, and drizzle it into stir-fries and baked beans with some cider vinegar.

Incidentally, a good friend of mine is lucky enough to come from a sprawling old Mennonite family with its very own Tigermilk recipe for the nutriment of its pregnant women. It includes both blackstrap molasses and orange juice -- a shocking combination until you consider that their babes are all healthy, and vitamin C helps with iron absorption. I plan to track down the recipe someday when it's needful. In the meantime, let us toast the vampires with shots of blackstrap and join in that rousing old chorus:

I gave myself to sin
And I've been there and back again
I gave myself to Providence
The state that I am in