Pumpkin, Marmalade and Hazelnut Muffins

I did a shoot for a client recently creating Autumn content for her slow living platform. Amongst other things one of the headline features of her work is food so as you can imagine there was a lot of conversation around seasonality.

We worked on one of those beautiful trans-seasonal days where the ends of summer nudge up against a budding autumn. Cool mornings and earlier sunsets bookend the days, the first of the leaves have started to turn threaded with veins of warm tones and our appetite for autumnal foods stretches from its hibernation. Our Sicilian feast featured, amongst other delights, rich ruby coloured stewed pears, apple cake (my favourite) and some delicious vegetable jewelled salads. It was a delight to shoot such beautiful heartfelt recipes and of course ‘clean them up’ afterwards. Tough job but someone’s gotta do it and all that. In the days that followed, as I sat at my desk editing, the conversation around seasonal eating and food shopping rattled around my head. These conversations with clients seem to rise to the top in my thoughts while I edit guiding my work, but this time I found myself thinking far deeper. How on earth do we eat seasonally in a have it now world where we can manipulate nature to deliver whatever our hearts desire precisely when we do? Tomatoes in the depths of winter sure aren’t as sweet and plump having matured in football field sized hot houses but when you want a fresh tomato you want a fresh tomato right? Then there’s some foods that flat out can’t be engineered to appear on our plates out of season without having their passports stamped jetting to our shops from crops across the oceans.

There’s all the usual commonly shared advice about shopping and eating with the seasons. Shopping at farmers markets, seeking out cheaper produce which usually denotes it’s abundance at market and therefore it’s time in season and of course the inherent knowledge of seasonality that many of us have. But with all this in mind I circled back to wondering how hard it actually is in a highly curated and engineered world to live by this in practice and resist the temptation to respond to an out of season craving.

I’m the first to put my hand up as one who does eat what I feel like, fresh tomatoes on toast on frosty winter mornings? Hell yeah. Soup in summer because I feel like it? Definitely! But I’m also the first to seize on figs when they appear at the green grocer. Carefully carrying the prized plump, soft, vulnerable globes in one hand awkwardly steering the trolley with my other hand, I’ll indulge every week until they disappear from the shelves. And when those spheres of sunshine in the form of mangoes start appearing? Get out of my way sista, they’re mine!!

While all of this is definitely seasonal shopping and eating what I did realise from all this ponderous behaviour was that quite possibly seasonal eating starts in the tummy. In our hot summers we often don’t feel like eating or feel like just having something lite. We reach for salads and seafood making the most of that which is abundant to us and which our climate and location does a wonderful job of creating. As the seasons turn our appetites return. We feel cold and need warming up and start yearning for soups, casseroles and puddings to fuel our body’s internal thermostat. And of course, the ingredients for all these are indeed driven by nature’s cycles our appetites, blooming with the crops that will feed them.

Whilst the idea for these muffins has been at the back of my mind for a while, it sat in summer hibernation. I just couldn’t see the wood for the trees and let it bloom while mango juice dripped through my fingers and I imagined dinners of juicy tomato salads.

But as the crisp mornings have greeted me on morning walks recently I’ve noticed a yearning for the flavours of the season and started cooking some of those warmer delights. So bloom, these muffins have. Autumnal sweet pumpkin roasted first, marmalade and crunchy hazelnuts all meld together to make a light muffin with a spiced streusel flavour cap on top that dust your fingers as it crumbles. Don’t be put off by what seems a longish list of bits and bobs below or a fiddly step in the middle, it’s so worth it and makes the first delicious bite with a warm drink all the more wroth it.

If you’re not a marmalade fan like I wasn’t for the first 45 years of my life, try subbing in apricot jam. It will still play tart foil to the sweet pumpkin without the bitterness of marmalade.

Streusel:

1/3 c plain flour

1/3 c brown sugar

½ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp salt flakes

40 gm butter

1 tb finely chopped hazelnut pieces (I buy them pre chopped, but you do you. If chopping your own go slowly to try and achieve small similarly sized pieces.)

Ingredients:

200 gm pumpkin peeled and cubes into small pieces around 1-1.5 cms

2 c plain flour

¼ c plain wholemeal flour

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground ginger

½ tsp grated nutmeg

¼ tsp ground cardamon

¾ tsp salt flakes

½ c brown sugar

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp bicarb soda

¼ c hazelnuts lightly chopped in large pieces

½ c oil of your choice, I use whatever I have, if you prefer olive oil go for it, if you lightly flavoured also fine. There’s enough flavour in the spices to mask a strongly flavoured oil like extra virgin.

2 eggs beaten

1 tsp vanilla

¾ milk of your choice. Non-dairy works fine here if that’s your preference.

2 Tb marmalade. If yours is chunky or the peel in long strands you may need to cut them. I leave the measured amount in a small bowl and plunge clean kitchen scissors in to snip them to smaller more manageable sized pieces.

Method:

Line a 12 hole muffin tray with muffin cases.

Preheat oven to 190c.

Toss cubed pumpkin in 2-3 tsps of olive oil. Spread in one layer on a lined baking sheet and roast in the oven for 15 minutes or until just soft and mashable with a fork. Allow to cool.

Combine streusel ingredients, except hazelnut pieces, and rub butter in until completely combined and resembling wet sand. Using your fingers mix in hazelnut pieces. Refrigerate until required.

In a large bowl combine all dry ingredients for the muffins and stir with a whisk to thoroughly combine. In a second bowl combine oil, eggs, vanilla and milk and whisk.

Halve roasted pumpkin pieces and mash one half reserving the other in whole cubes. Whisk the mashed pumpkin into the wet ingredients.

Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, pour in the combined wet ingredinets and gently fold together until dry ingredients are almost combined. Over the top of the batter dollop drops of marmalde and give the mixture a few more gentle folds.

Take your prepared muffin tray and half fill each case with batter. Top each case of batter with a few cubes of pumpkin, roughly 3-4 each, then top muffin with the remaining batter. Don’t worry too much if the pumpkin cubes aren’t all covered as the streusel will sort this out. Sprinkle streusel over each muffin evenly using up most if not all of the streusel. Pop in the oven 25-30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clea,

Serve warm with butter because YUM or store cooled in an air tight container.