photos by Shilpa Saravanan, editor-in-chief
This month, A Moveable Feast tried three recipes from New York-based recipe blog smitten kitchen. (We recommend it highly — for the totally inspirational food photography, the humor and of course, the food.) February draws to a close, and the verdict’s in.
BEST: Above, regardez the famous Blue Sky bran muffins (yes, the ones shared in this week’s breakfast, and eaten for this week’s breakfast as well) made with ground-up rolled oats instead of bran & filled to bursting with blackberries because, well… a) not everyone keeps wheat bran around & b) no muffin-worthy fruits are really in season, so on-sale blackberries sounded just as good as anything else. To anyone used to sweet, cake-like coffeeshop muffins, these muffins might be a bit on the bland/sad side — they’re practically health food, and they do taste like it. But once you have a few of them, you’ll realize that they’re divine & anything but bland. The fruit flavor really shines through (given the general lack of extra sugar in the recipe), and the grains give the muffin a certain gravitas that’s missing in traditional cake muffins. You’ll probably eat more than one. You won’t regret it, too much.
RUNNER-UP: These blondies are just as infinitely adaptable as the recipe claims, and perhaps even more so. (“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities,” said some book we can’t remember the name of that could have been charming, although this column in “Scientific American” calls that statement “inaccurate.” Mathematicians argue beautifully in the comments.) You can basically put anything you want in these — m&ms would be ideal, but as we only had chocolate chips & caramels on hand, we used those to a sweet, buttery, melty end. The recipe’s super quick & forgiving — think brownies, except with brown sugar instead of chocolate. The blondie batter (being essentially just butter, brown sugar and flour) is almost tastier than the finished blondies themselves. We dare you to bake a full batch without tasting any of it.
STILL EDIBLE: We had high hopes for this everyday chocolate cake because of how simple (!) the recipe is. Cake’s never looked so doable: it probably doesn’t require anything that you don’t already have somewhere in your kitchen. The cake smelled & looked great, the batter was ever-so-lickable — but the finished cake came out of the oven rather dry! If you choose to make this, measure your flour & cocoa carefully, and perhaps underbake it a little. Regardless of how much we expected & didn’t receive from this cake, we won’t go so far as to say it was a waste of a perfectly good stick of butter — the crust is nice & crunchy, and who knows, like many cakes out there, the interior might be better tomorrow after we let the flavors settle. And of course, you can never go wrong with either a) making French toast out of this or b) eating it with gobs of ice cream / whipped cream / whatever dairy delight suits your fancy.
