This is another recipe from my sister, Pauline Neumann, the comedian in the family.
My sister loves playing tricks on her family. She has been known to hide in wardrobes at night and leap out just after her kids have climbed into bed. How they never had nightmares I'll never know.
Her trickery has, in some ways, been passed on to her son, Adam. One day I took Adam and my son, Jeremy, to visit a display home. They would have been about 15 and 13 years old, respectively, at the time.
I hadn't realized that Adam had quietly climbed into a built-in wardrobe. Jeremy knew he was in there but had gotten bored and wandered off elsewhere. Adam loomed out of the wardrobe just as some poor unsuspecting man and his young daughter walked into the bedroom. The poor man was even more startled than necessary, bearing in mind that, even at age 15, Adam was over 6' tall and skinny as a rake. The man must have thought an over-sized stick insect had come to grab him. Laughing aside, here is my sister's Plum Muffin Recipe:
Ingredients:
2 and 1/2 cups of self raising flour
3/4 cup whole meal self raising flour
1 cup caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 and 1/2 cups skimmed milk
2/3 cup oil
5 - 6 very firm cooking plums, stoned and chopped
Method:
Pre heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Sift the dry ingredients. Quickly add the wet ingredients. Combine together without over-doing the beating. The mixture should be only just combined. Pour into greased muffin trays and cook at 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit) for 20 25 minutes.
Makes 24 small muffins or 16 large muffins.
Notes:
If your plums are not as firm as they could be then don't add them to the bowl before beating. Just place the plain muffin mixture in the trays and poke pieces of plum down into the mixture.
This recipe is delightful using mulberries too. As in the note above, you should just push the mulberries down into the mixture.
My sister tells me she has successfully used ricotta cheese in lieu of the oil but I haven't tried this myself as yet.
Food Facts:
There are over 2000 varieties of plums in existence. Even in ancient Roman times, there were already over 300 varieties of European plums.
