Well. That title just about says it all. I got the recipe for the Cream-of-Wheat muffins from the Once-A-Month Meals blog. I got the idea to add apricots from having two bags of dried apricots in the cabinet. No doubt my fault. But too much is a better problem than not enough. I’ve also always found it peculiar that they’re called dried fruits; raisins, prunes, apricots. But the appellation is more appealing than calling them ‘gummy’ fruits. Even though they are more gummy than dry. Then again, they’re not called desiccated fruit. So it’s a matter of to what degree they are dried, I suppose. The point is, as dried fruit they are still moist but not wet. In this case, it’s the moisture that remains that’s still a problem. In order to deal with it, I put four ounces of dried apricots in the food processor with a quarter cup flour. Instead of gummy apricot residue coating the inside of my processor, I got tiny apricot pellets. From that start, I put the rest of the ingredients from the recipe into the stand mixer with the apricot pellets.
Ingredients
- 4 oz dried apricot
- ¼ cup flour
- 1 cup Flour, All-Purpose
- 1 cup Hot Wheat Cereal
- ½ cups Sugar
- ¾ cups Milk
- ¼ cups Vegetable Oil
- 1 individual Egg
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
- 1 tablespoon Baking Powder
- ½ teaspoons Salt
Mix the mix and dole the results out into a greased 12 cup muffin tin. I chose not to use cupcake cups. But I can see where others might. And bake it at 400°F for about 12 minutes.
The maple sugar glaze I accomplished with powdered sugar, maple syrup, and milk. And of those quantities, I can only say for certain that I used a tablespoon of maple syrup. Everything else was a balancing act. I started with about a quarter cup of powdered sugar in a medium mixing bowl. I added what looked like a couple of tablespoons of milk to it, only to have it come out rather runnier than I wanted. So I added more powdered sugar to it until it got to a density I like to think of as “pancake batter”.
Now, here’s a little trick to glazing. Take the muffins out of the muffin tin and put them on a wire rack with wax paper under it. The excess glaze that runs off of the muffin is captured on the wax paper and can be re-introduced to the mixing bowl. In my case, the original glaze got recirculated three times to the top of the muffin.
