Mondo Muffins

It's amazing how one song can take you back to your college days. The other day I was doing errands in my car without the children in tow. Both kids were at school and for once (!) I got to listen to the music that *I* wanted to hear: No Raffi, no Led Zeppelin and certainly no Music Together ("Hello everybody! So glad to see you!") for this girl. Just some good old fashioned grunge music on KFOG. Pearl Jam's "Black" came on and immediately I was transported back to the pastry kitchen of the cafe that I worked at in college. I only lasted about three months as a pastry baker on the graveyard shift because I was also working as a nanny during the day and trying to hold down a full schedule of classes. You can guess what happened to my G.P.A. during that time. It sped downhill so fast that I had to use every extra credit trick in the book to pull it back up again.

I loved the job even though the hours were brutal on me. I would go into the shop at 4 AM, prep and bake all the baked goods for the cafe and then go to classes at 10 AM, often with flour under my fingernails and butter hand prints smeared on the butt of my jeans. I felt this need to fill every moment of my life with "something" and I thought it felt wildly romantic to be up at 4 AM baking scones and croissants while the rest of the world slept. I loved the solitude of my work, being alone with Pearl Jam thumping through the kitchen stereo and having the authority to make whatever I felt like with the ingredients on hand. It was great to be creative for once and it was there that I discovered that I am a morning person - till I had kids and they redefined what a "morning person" really is.

The owners of the cafe were a young couple that had moved to my little college town right after they married in Louisiana. The wife had been a cook in the army and she knew a lot about cooking large quantities of food, she ran a tight ship with the college students as her employees. Her recipes for the cafe pretty much all came from her mother's kitchen and one of the most popular items we made were the Mondo Muffins. They were baked in oversized muffin tins and we always had several different kinds to chose from. Whenever I could swing it with the ingredients on hand, I would always made the Coffee Cake Mondo Muffin. It was packed with walnuts and I was very generous with the crumble topping because I thought it was the most delicious treat in the world.  I could not get enough of those muffins.

But as my grades and social life slipped (I was the only person leaving the bars as many of my friends were just starting their night out) I knew I had to find another job. I gave my two weeks notice to the cafe and they asked if I would consider working as a barista in the front of the cafe. I immediately accepted the job and worked there till I graduated.

I didn't have to give up my Mondo Muffins or the mean coffee addiction I created while working there, but I did have to give up making the call on what we would be selling that day. It was a bittersweet goodbye, but probably for the best.


I don't have the original recipe anymore because I lost it somewhere between here and 1996, but I recently combined an old Martha Stewart recipe with a crumb topping recipe from Smitten Kitchen and had great results. I highly advise eating these at 6 AM while driving a 1972 Volkswagon bug, listening to some Pearl Jam and wearing your boyfriend's flannel shirt and your brand spankin' new Doc Marten's.

Cafe Paulo's Coffee Cake Mondo Muffins
(Combined recipes from Smitten Kitchen and Martha Stewart)

Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), plus more for pans
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour cream
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

For the crumb topping

1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1 3/4 cups flour

Directions

• Prepare crumb topping: in a large bowl, whisk sugars, spices and salt into melted butter until smooth. Then, add flour with a spatula or wooden spoon. It will look and feel like a solid dough. Leave it pressed together in the bottom of the bowl and set aside.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

• Prepare muffins: Butter and flour a jumbo 12-cup muffin tin (or two 6-cup muffin tins). 

• In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. Using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat together butter, sour cream, granulated sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well combined. With mixer on low, beat flour mixture into butter mixture. Stir in walnuts. Divide the batter among the prepared muffin cups. Using your fingers, crumble the crumb mixture on top of the muffins. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Traditions

This is my first guest blog entry and I am so excited to share it with everyone. Emma created an incredible childrens book database and writes reviews about the books that she comes across on her many trips to the library and around the city. She is also a close friend that I have mentioned here and there on this blog. So you can imagine my delight when she took the time to write about something that I think is perfect for this time of year and one that we certainly hold near and dear to our hearts in this family. Traditions.

For the record, it was Emma who inspired us to make cracked Dungeness crab a December tradition. Now if I can just convince my husband and son to get out there and catch a few crabs at 4 in the morning on the pier in Pacifica, we'd be set for the entire month. Take it away, Emma!

Tradition. It’s one of the things we strive to both maintain and create as we make our way through our stressful, scary lives. The stakes rise after you have kids. You so desperately want to be the kind of person who writes into parenting magazines saying, “Every December, we have a sleepover in the living room the first night we put up the Christmas tree,” or, “My kids and I have made this same cookie every December since the year they were born.” I remember sitting in a baby group when my son was one month old and the moderator asked, “What traditions would you like to create as your children grow?” I was panic-stricken as we moved around the room. I think I mumbled something lame like, “Uh, I plan to make them a great birthday cake every year.” Because that’s the thing about traditions: you can’t predict them. They have to evolve organically, grow by themselves from the messy bit parts that make up your day-to-day life.

With nothing, of course, is tradition more entwined than with food. Again, here I have major tradition envy. I remember my dear friend Amanda, she of this very blog, telling me that their family makes gingerbread waffles every Christmas morning. I think our Christmas morning breakfast is a last-minute pulling-things-out-of-fridge as we drag ourselves from our beds after having been up till midnight stuffing stockings. When she told me, I had a momentary thought of stealing her tradition, but I knew it wouldn’t stick. Again, you can’t force tradition.

I tend to think of myself as more spontaneous (read: disorganized) than tradition-bound, by nature. But of course, when I stop and look closely at my life, I see that we have traditions, too. Because I’m close to them, they may not be as clean and pretty as the two-liners I read about in magazines and on blogs. In all their real-life disarray, here are some of the food traditions that bring joy to my own life:

• The Bûche de Noël yule log cake that I make every Christmas alongside my mom. Part of the tradition is, every darn year, forgetting which of the gazillion recipes out there we usually use, and frantically paging through cookbooks and trawling the Internet to find the right one. 

• My husband roasting chestnuts. I love this tradition because he does all the work.

• The scones my mom learned to make living in Scotland when I was a baby. The scones are more biscuit-like than the bakery ones we’re used to here, and I love how they’re baked in a round and cut into wedges.

• Cracked Dungeness crab at the holidays, usually just twice because it’s so expensive.

• My aunt’s homemade yeast rolls. The recipe comes from her grandmother, my great-grandmother, and we have never had a holiday dinner without them. Hot from the oven and smothered with butter, they are, hands-down, the best thing on the table. (Recipe below!)

• My parents’ food-crazed yellow Labrador Retriever stealing at least one precious food item a year. When my son turned three and my mom baked him a cake in the form of the first letter of his name, guess who wolfed the whole thing behind our backs? Rosie. One Easter eve the dog gulped down ten hard-boiled eggs, shells and all. And one Christmas we bought an expensive Panettone for my aunt who was just back from Italy. Rosie ate it. But it’s okay—the story will last longer than the memory of the Panettone would have.

• Abalone, mussels, and halibut, all courtesy of my fisherman brothers. Never am I so proud to live on the northern coast of California as when I am with my family table feasting on local seafood, plucked fresh from the brine just hours before.

• Eggnog, the day after Thanksgiving. Irish coffees on Christmas morning with my in-laws. Wine at any hour with my friends. My brother’s homemade beer. Charles Shaw red (hey, we served it at our wedding!). Rosé with my husband in the summer. A glass of sparkling wine in the lobby of the Hyatt every Christmas season, as my kids go nuts around me. These are some of the little things that give my life a twinkle.

• And lastly, lest you think me a snob, a bag of potato chips, a diet soda, and a beef jerky on road trips to see Grandma up north. There’s a time and a place for everything.

 What are your food traditions?

Grandma Katherine's Rolls

I'll make the rolls for a dinner with our families sometime. They're so soft and yeasty--basically fresh-baked white bread in muffin form.

4-5 cups flour

1Tablespoon salt

1 1/2 Tablespoons sugar

1/4 cup shortening

1 package dry yeast

1 3/4 to 2 cups warm water

vegetable oil

Sift four cups of the flour, the salt and the sugar into a large bowl. Mix shortening into flour mixture with fingers. Make a hole in the middle, put yeast in, add about half of the water, and mix until dissolved. Add remaining water and mix thoroughly. If dough is too sticky, add a little of the remaining one cup flour. Dough should be quite soft. Put some vegetable oil on top, cover, and let rise in warm place for about two hours. Form into rolls with oiled hands, set into muffin tins, and let rise another 1-2 hours. Bake at 450 for about ten minutes, until tops are lightly browned. Eat instantly with butter!