We’ve been on a muffin tear this week.  But our Honey Girl’s Mr. Right arrives tomorrow morning from Alabama for a visit.  And since his favorite meal of the day is breakfast, she’s test driving another muffin idea we had tonight to make sure it’s perfect for an airport basket-full-of-love welcome.  As we were walking through the co-op, picking up some delicious things in which to poach some fish for dinner, I thought the richness of mascarpone might be nice in a muffin, and she immediately disappeared towards the produce section for some beautiful meyer lemons.  This recipe will definitely be in our repertoire from here on out.  I happened to have some candied meyer lemon slices in the refrigerator for a glow-y garnish, but they are delicious all by themselves, moist and rich, with a bright but soft lemon flavor and the lightness of a muffin.  (See our true muffin obsession here and here.  No muffin imposters, please!)  They’re especially nice straight from the oven with a generous lashing of fresh butter.  Now that’s a nice welcome.

My Honey Girl loves a good muffin.  Not an oil-oozing, oversized piece of pound cake in a muffin paper.  A true muffin.  Dainty.  Well flavored.   Muffin in nature with little relationship to cake.  She made these the day she arrived from college for spring break, from a recipe I improvised when she asked for one for an orange muffin with lots of heady orange flavor and some dark chocolate.   When she was a wee one she insisted that we call cupcakes muffin cakes, since they were cake baked in a muffin tin and not, as she pointed out correctly, in cups.  In fact, she wrote to an editor of the Merriam Webster dictionary to ask that the lexicon be appropriately changed to note this and other important distinctions.  Muffins are muffins.  Cake is cake. Cupcakes are cake baked in a muffin tin.  Muffins should never be cupcakes.  And never should they be confused in language or substance.   Yup.  She had lots of questions and lots of pronouncements when she was four.  Well, she always had lots of questions.  And we were so happy, tracking down answers (and more questions) at the library and over muffins and a glass of cold milk.  Now that she’s almost grown up, it’s muffins and a cup of  black tea with milk, and more questions, of course.  She’s a curious pickle.  And we love her for it.

Before you have a stroke at the yield of this recipe, bear with me.  I have a recipe, which I’ll post tomorrow, for your leftover muffins, which is pretty heavenly, this one for our Sweet Boy.

I picked up my Honey Girl this morning from an early flight from Boston.  She is my pearl, my sunshine, my joy.  So it seemed fitting to make these pearl muffins and some shiny-wiggly, glowy-jiggly winter citrus jelly for her welcome-home breakfast.  I took the syrup I boiled down yesterday from the candied winter citrus I made the day before and cooked it a bit longer.  The pectin from all that pretty citrus brought it together into a honeyed jelly.  I’m not usually a jelly lover.  Give me jams and confitures, preserves and conserves, something that’s thick with fruit.  But this sweet little jelly has such pure flavor it may have just converted me.  You can taste the grapefruit and the cara cara and blood oranges, the tangerines, the meyer lemon and the kumquats, not individually so much, but as soft and bittersweet impressions. I love this kind of cooking, finding ways to use up everything that comes out of the kitchen.  I’m going to smear the last of it between mini layers of brown butter almond cake in a day or two.  The pearl muffins are a true muffin, none of this muffin as hunk-o-cake business.  They are simple, too, not overly sweet, with a delicate crumb and the slightest tug.  I baked them in a little pool of melted butter and with an extra sprinkling of raw sugar.  My Honey Girl and I enjoyed some larded with the jelly.  They were so good, but not as delicious as having her in the kitchen with me and home again.  Life is sweeter when she is near.

This beautiful violaceous heirloom grain caught my eye at the co-op yesterday, so I picked up a bag and decided to grind it into flour and turn it into a batch of muffins.  I think I was channeling my Honey Girl, because I improvised a baking recipe.  I took the lovely lavender flour and added some milk to it, soured with a tablespoon of white vinegar.  I added some neutral oil and some unsweetened applesauce for moisture and some white sugar for sweetness.  A little orange zest and grated nutmeg seemed like they might be happy partners in the mix, so I added them, too, plus a little baking soda and baking powder to make them rise.  Then I folded in whole wheat pastry flour, a present from my Honey Girl’s Mr. Right’s Southern mom, until the texture felt muffiny.  I scooped them into a tin, popped them into the oven, and baked them for 15 minutes.  Perfect!  They are moist and tender and quite nice. The flavor of the purple prairie barley is quite unlike anything I’ve had before, sweet and ever so slightly smoky.  I’m going to have one of these pretty lilac-flecked muffins for breakfast with a melting pat of Hope Creamery butter and a nice mug of tea.  I baked a dozen today and have batter left over.  I suspect it will keep in the refrigerator, such that you could bake off a few muffins for breakfast each morning for a few days.  Doesn’t that sound nice, emerging from the shower to a fresh-from-the-oven muffin?  I think I’ll try that tomorrow.  Eat one and sing a chorus of “Purple Grain.”