MindSpinner

Merry Christmas, everyone. On this shortest day of the year, keep hearts bright and warm together .

We aren’t really having cereal for Christmas breakfast at our house. Cereal just doesn’t seem like something to tempt teenagers out of bed.

We are having fruit, ham biscuits, and sweet potato muffins instead. The sweet potato muffins are my favorite, and even people who disdain sweet potatoes find themselves liking these. I tasted them first at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern in Williamsburg back in my William and Mary undergraduate days and have made them ever since from a recipe in The Williamsburg Cookbook, with minor adjustments.

Here’s the recipe for a dozen regular-sized muffins. (I like them best as mini muffins, which is what the recipe calls for, but I don’t have mini muffin pans anymore.) There are versions of the recipe on the Web, but these seem altered from the original, with more sugar than I like. I’m writing out the directions rather more fully than the cookbook does because I envision making a small recipe collection of some family favorites for my children sometime soon, and I may as well start with this one. Catapult Kid has studiously avoided the kitchen all of his life, but may take up cooking in order to stave off starvation or, more likely, impress a girl. Such things are possible. Dark-haired daughter alternates between an occasional desire to make edible, recognizable dishes and whimsical, mad scientist sorts of experiments involving ingredients I’d originally intended for human consumption. Results vary. Anyway, someday, these two may want to know how to make these muffins. That is my fantasy, and I’m sticking to it.

2/3 cup cooked fresh sweet potatoes, well drained
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg (I use two.)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon (doubled from original recipe)
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup pecans, chopped
1/4 cup raisins, chopped

Directions
Boil a couple of sweet potatoes until they are tender. When they cool, skin them. They are easy to skin once cooked - no potato peeler required; a fork lifts the skin off easily.
Chop 1/4 cup of raisins.
Chop 1/4 cup of pecans. (I go a little overboard on the raisins and pecans. I also coat the raisin pieces with a little bit of flour after chopping them and then mix them up with the pecans so that the raisins don’t all stick together. We don’t want raisin gob muffins.)
Puree (totally mash) the skinned sweet potatoes with a potato masher (my choice, takes up less room in dishwasher, no assembly required), a food processor, or a blender.

Grease muffin tins.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
With a mixer, cream the butter and sugar in a medium-sized bowl until smooth. Beat in the eggs and pureed sweet potatoes.
Sift the flour with the baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a small bowl.
Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Mix gently by hand until ingredients are just blended - i.e., there’s no dry flour at the bottom of the bowl, and there are no balls of flour that puff open when you stir. Instead, the batter will have lots of little lumps. These should not be persecuted by over mixing, or your muffins may be hockey pucks. Gently stir in the chopped nuts and raisins.

Spoon batter into the greased muffin tins, filling each about 3/4 full if you want 12 standard muffins out of the recipe. These muffins are not fluffy and tall but rich and moist.

Bake at 400 degrees F for 25 minutes for mini muffins, 10 minutes longer for regular-sized ones.