Apple, cardamom & buckwheat muffins

One of my regular Google searches is to check just how much notice I need to take of the ‘best before’ or BBE dates on food items in my pantry.

Now we’re back into a full-blown lockdown here in the UK I’m once again going through the shelves to see what we’ve got and more importantly how soon it needs to be consumed by. I do try to use things in sequence but the lockdowns have shown me that maybe I’m not quite as methodical as I like to think.

Best before dates are one of the banes of kitchen life. For starters what do they actually mean? Will the food no longer be edible after the date, will it be marginally changed from when you first tasted it, or are they the manufacturers get out of jail card. My guess is there is a large element of the later, almost as if to say ‘don’t blame us if it doesn’t taste quite as good as when you opened it’. This is backed up by the fact that so far all of my searches have found the food to be usable way beyond the BBE.

At a time when food waste, and efforts to reduce it, is becoming an ever bigger issue I can’t help thinking these dates are a major contributory factor. Without a clear understanding of their meaning, many people are going to see them as ‘use by’ dates and assume anything beyond them has to be binned.

One of the first pantry items to spark this search on the current lockdown was a bag of Buckwheat flour. This is a particularly flavoursome flour which works well in cakes and other sweet bakes.

In the last couple of years, I’ve become a bit of an obsessive and am prone to head straight for the flour shelves in any bakery, deli or health food store I enter, although not at the moment of course. The problem is I tend to bake with the new one as soon as I get it, but then the tail end of the packet somehow finds it’s way to the back of the shelf, hidden by my latest purchase

The good news is the Buckwheat flour was still perfectly usable and this Benjamina Ebuehi recipe was the perfect way to use it up. The beauty of this recipe is the fruit, spice and flour can all be changed around to make use of whatever you have to hand in your cupboards. Exactly the sort of recipe we need at the moment.

Ingredients

• 2 eating apples – peeled & cored
• 130g buckwheat flour
• 75g caster sugar
• 1tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 60g unsalted butter – melted
• 100ml milk
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 0.5tsp cardamom pods – crushed

To top

• 1tbsp oats
• 1tbsp pumpkin seeds
• 2tbsp demerara sugar

Method

• Heat the oven to gas mark 7 and grease or line a six-hole muffin tin.
• Grate one of the apples and chop the other into 1cm cubes
• Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, bicarb & salt into a bowl.  
• In another bowl whisk the egg, melted butter, milk, vanilla and cardamom, then stir in the grated apple.
• Pour the wet mixture into the dry and then gently fold together.
• Pour the batter into the muffin tin and press some of the apple chunks into each cup. 
• Sprinkle with the oats, seeds and demerara. 
• Bake for 8 minutes, then reduce the oven to gas mark 4 and bake for another 10 minutes.
• Leave to cool completely before turning out of the tin.