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Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffins

Sean Sellers  in Dessert Wine, Semillon, Blow the Bank, Desserts , , , , ,

InterWined Food
Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week ‘Blow the Bank’ returns to Beatrice Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande, and her Versatility in a Spinach and Sweet Potato Cake to bring you Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffins.

Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffins

For many eaters, muffins are synonymous with one meal — breakfast. But, long before the humble blueberry muffin appeared in a powder from Betty Crocker or its low fat oat cranberry cousin went on sale at Starbucks, the muffin was a tea cake and before that a bread.

So while Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin makes an excellent breakfast muffin — and it does to be sure — it also makes a superb dessert cake and, even, a superior alternative to the more common apple sauce and potato found served alongside a nice pork loin or chop. (Don’t believe me, try it and you’ll see.)

On this occasion, InterWined chose to serve it as a dessert or pudding, as some people might prefer.

The 2006 Peter Lehmann Botrytis Semillon (12.5%), £7.99 from Oddbins for a half bottle and widely available in the US for approximately $18-$20, made for an almost perfect match. Why almost perfect? The wine is just a tad too sugary sweet. Peter Lehmann’s chief winemaker confidently proclaims the 2006 vintage its finest ever produced, and InterWined is hard pressed to disagree. This wine is fresh and, mostly, easy-to-drink. The colour is a honeyed gold, with the slight sense of honey continuing on the nose before really hitting the palate with a burst of honeyed fruit. This is wine made from bees, if ever there was one.

But, for InterWined, it all comes back to the sensation that there is just a tad too much sweetness in the wine. Normally, if one finds a dessert wine too sweet it would indicate an imbalance. Yet, in all honesty, I don’t think that there is one. The slightness of it all could equally suggest that my complaint is simply one of personal preference. (Maybe I just don’t like wine made of noble rot, as much as I thought I did.)

In terms of the pairing, what might have made this a more prefect match and probably helped to overcome any nagging sense of sweetness would have been to increase the amount of sweet potato and cheese by a few millimetres and sprinkle into the mixture a few more twists of pepper mill. But be careful when doing so, too much grated potato or cheese and the muffin will loose its very appealing lightness and become quite stodgy.

In the end, Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin with Peter Lehmann’s Botrytis Semillon: 8.something rather impressive but equally probably rather meaningless, something Robert Parker Scale-esque like 86/100. Whatever that means.

Mostly InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin
(Makes six muffins)

Ingredients:
2-3 medium eggs
200g all-purpose flour
150-200g peeled sweet potato (about the size of one medium long, medium round potato)
1 brambly apple (substitute only with a tart, mostly dry, and dense equivalent)
75-100g of hard cheese (Emmenthal works best; but cheddar works well with apples too)
100ml cup milk
100ml olive oil
Several twists of fresh ground pepper
1½ tsp Cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C
2. Core and peel the brambly apple, then chop into small squares
3. On a chopping board, grate the peeled sweet potato
4. In a large mixing bowl, add the flour followed by the eggs. Be sure to add the eggs one at a time as you go to ensure that the mixture is not too eggy. (You might not need the third egg).
5. Add the milk and mix, followed by the oil.
6. Add the cinnamon and mix; then, add the baking powder
7. Add the apple and sweet potato to the mixture and stir
8. Grate and then add the cheese to the mix
9. Stir again, before spooning evenly onto the muffin tray
10. Place in the oven and cook for 50 minutes
11. Once cooked, remove from the oven and cool for approximately 5 minutes before serving

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