The women in my family often has the peculiar habit of taking 25 minutes to tell you something that could be said in 5 minutes tops.
This is because they tell you all the prequels.

And since I’m 50% just like their DNA I think that today I’m going to do exactly the same.

Last summer we came back from Calabria with the usual load of foods and goods: evoo, tomato sauce, dried figs, “non-spicy” (yeah, whatever…) sausages with fennel and, new entry, one lt of sweet almonds milk.
Me and the nuts family? Not big fans. I’ll eat 10 nuts and 15 peanuts top in a year. That’s it. I run screaming from hazelnuts, I barely tolerate insipid almonds with chicken. Thus it won’t be hard for you to understand that I do not drink almond milk, not for lack of trying though… I try to approach it every summer, it seems so refreshing and smells great. But no, I don’t like it.
Sa does though, but it’s one of those things you have only when you’re on holiday. Coming back home almost in september and being greated by a grey weather… well, it doesn’t make for tall glasses of almond milk. So the carton was parked in our fridge ever since.

The other day I finally clean the fridge, yeah, about time. And I realize that that white and red carton is not a part of the fridge, but something edible. Maybe. So I check the expiration date: 2015.
Yay! Still good! So I google “sweet almonds milk recipes”.
And I get gelato, puddings, more or less complicated things, but I push back.
Then one day my mom calls, she’s found my great grandma tea set and in the meanwhile I realize how long it has been since the last time I baked muffins. So I think that probably substituting cow milk with almond milk isn’t that crazy.
I google some more and a trusted italian recipe website (Giallozafferano) helps me as usual, with a recipe with very cute pictures of chocolate chip muffins with almond milk.

Now, what does this have to do with the intro about my family’s dna? Except justifying the verbosity of this all? Well, dna serves me another alibi.
This is one of my grandma’s special traits: she takes a recipe and she substitutes almost 95% of the ingredients, because she makes do with anything she has around the kitchen.

Well, I’ve found out that I’m this way as well.
The original recipe (linked above so you could see the pictures) stated as follows:

350 gr white flour
50 gr rice flour
150 gr white sugar
200 ml almond milk
120 gr chocolate chips
1 egg
125 gr white diet yogurt
50 ml sunflower oil
1 bag vanilla baking powder
1 pinch of salt

Since I didn’t have some of the things listed, but I was set on making muffins, here’s how I did it:

350 gr white flour (ok, this was easy)
50 gr potato flour (come on, rice, potatoes… starch is starch)
150 gr brown cane sugar (I have a jar of it, and I use it very seldom, so I have to use big quantities of it when I can!)
200 ml almond milk (at least my starting point stayed!)
120 gr chocolate chips (just because the package was already opened, otherwise I was more than willing to reuse the chocolate from easter eggs)
1 egg (another easy one)
125 gr banana yogurt (this is what I had in the fridge)
50 ml peanut oil (the one I got for Carnival’s fritters, this bottle sits in my pantry, I don’t fry often… so at least I’ve used some!)
1 bag vanilla baking powder
1 pinch of salt

The recipe says it’s enough for 12 muffins and shows you those pretty and perfect domes in those pretty dotted papers-thingies. It also says to fill the tin almost to the brim.
I have a tin with 12 muffin slots, my batch would have been enough for 12 muffins and maybe 6 more if I had wanted to make small cute things and more than one round in the oven…
But since I was feeling lazy and I didn’t want to spend any more time pouring the batch in the tins, I just divided it equally in the 12 ramekins.
Basically what I took out of the oven were muffin-golems, but some of them have the most perfect mushroom shape!!!

The most important thing, though, is that they turned out veeeeeery good. Maybe a tad bit too banana flavoured, the almond got completely lost. But I’m not sad 😛

I’m thinking to experiment even further, though.
Ready for another storytime?

When I worked in Milan there was a tiny bakery/pastry/coffee/bar that used to have very yummy things. The cherry of my eye were the “baci di ricotta”.
I’ve googled “Pattini’s baci di ricotta recipe” more than once, but with no results.
They looked like muffin tops, same shape, same density. Very sweet and chewey, and nice to bite into. White, with chocolate chips.

This experimental muffins I just made are a dead ringer to these baci di ricotta. So next experiment will consist in: using ricotta instead of yogurt.

If they turn out just right I’ll do the victory dance and of course I’ll let you know 😉

PS
Yeah, I almost forgot, the procedure it’s always the same, just for any other muffin: dry ingredients first, then wet ingredients, mix everything together with a wooden spoon, pour everything in the ramekins, put in the oven (already hot, 180°C) for 20 minutes. Let cool. Enjoy

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