Makes 10 muffins
IF YOU WERE A CHILD OF THE LATE ’70S AND EARLY ’80S, YOU LIKELY WENT THROUGH the harrowing period of your mom taking a flamethrower to everything in the cabinets that actually tasted good, and then expecting you to pretend carob was chocolate. Perhaps you also then had to take new, weird vitamins from a pyramid scheme company. Or occasionally sit in a hot car during yet another trip to a food co-op that smelled so weird inside you opted for the hot car. (This was also obviously before people called the cops on parents for this sort of thing.) My informal research of people my age indicates my experience was far from isolated, and that we all remember this torture lasting for approximately six months.
A bright spot in this bleak era of eating was the Jiffy bran muffin mix that would sometimes appear in the cupboard. Perhaps it was the “bran” and inclusion of fossilized dates in the powdery mix that allowed it to make the cut? I didn’t care about the logic, because after too many snacks of cardboardy sprouted wheat cracker things, a Jiffy bran muffin hit the palate like a Twinkie. And even after this phase of hippie culinary values passed, I continued to crave those box-mix muffins. I still love a simple bran muffin, in fact. Nubbly with a springy chew, not too sweet, great with a smear of butter. Sometimes I throw in raisins, dates, dried cherries or blueberries, never carob. But most often I just want a straightforward, simple bran muffin.
3 cups/135 g bran flake cereal, finely crushed
1¼ cups/160 g unbleached all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled
⅔ cup/148 g firmly packed light brown sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup/225 g well-shaken buttermilk
⅓ cup/75 g vegetable oil
1 large egg
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 tablespoons/37 g turbinado sugar for sprinkling
Into a large bowl, combine the cereal, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Mix again, breaking down any clumps of brown sugar.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, oil, egg, and vanilla. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir to blend well. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, or up to 12 hours. The batter will become very thick.
Position a rack to the center of the oven and preheat it to 400°F/200°C. Line a 12-well muffin tin with 10 paper liners. Divide the batter equally among the cups, filling them completely. Sprinkle with the turbinado sugar. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Let cool in the tin for 2 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
TIP > This recipe makes a rather, shall we say, controversial yield of 10 muffins. You can stretch it to an even dozen by putting less batter in each cup, but I like a generous look to my muffins, so I fill the muffin cups right up to the top and just make 10. You can double the recipe and keep the batter in a big covered bowl, refrigerated for up 5 days, baking off muffins as you need them.