Today Yesterday, one day before New Year’s Eve, I woke up to the first snow of winter. It wasn’t much to speak of, let alone to cover the streets and trees with a blanket of white snow, however, it surely made me accept that the cold winter had finally set in. For some reason, I have a history of baking something with chocolate on the first snow day, not that I intend to do. Watching it snow, I felt lucky not having to go out in the wind and cold.

I opened the fridge and found only one egg…grrr…I used up all the eggs to make Caramelised Leek Goat Cheese Tart for the Christmas dinner. Oh, yeah, the party was good, crowded with expats married to Turks and their kids, and we had a feast with all the typical Christmas foods, even mulled wine and panettone, which was probably the most popular.We played a present exchange game and I was the last to pick or steal a present. The Canadian lady who got panettone and a jar of maple syrup looked at me with a desperate look as if pleading me not to steal her present. So I didn’t; I really felt that she would cry if I did.

So what can you bake with only one egg??? Going outside just for eggs was out of question so I had to improvise a recipe for one-egg chocolate muffins.

Though it’s a bad idea to post this right after Pumpkin Persimmon Soup, I’m determined to write one last post for 2014 as if it would stretch the remaining day into infinity; it might in my memory though; I wrote on NYE!

Using a persimmon wasn’t in my plan, nor was posting this recipe, but when I saw it sitting on the kitchen window sill, – the rest after making kimchi had gone into the freezer (persimmons, pumpkins and ginger are useful frozen) – I thought I’d give it a try since everything was going to be modified and all I wanted was something sweet and comforting. But it turned out much better than I’d expected!

When the muffins came out of the oven, I could hardly resist them, and, though I knew they were hot, I grabbed one and took a bite, haha, of course, I got the roof of the mouth burnt! Who cares, though, if it’s a punishment for a guilty pleasure!

These muffins contain the usual healthy flours I’ve been enjoy using as you must know by now, such as buckwheat, almond meal and cornmeal, and it also contains the flours that you won’t be able to guess. This is the goodies I brought from Korea, which are hard to get anywhere else in the world. This is a magic black flour mix, which contains 5 black grains. Have a guess what they would be?

Ok, the mix contains black soybeans, black beans, black rice, black sesame and sorghum. You would probably wonder why the flour isn’t black. It’s because these grains have black kernels, not the inside. We normally make smoothies with this and it becomes black. One thing I’d been missing beside cheese is tofu and soybean sprouts, and when I went to Korea in October, I brought many bags of dried soybeans, soy flour, etc. So I’m going to make tofu from now on! I have no concern for GMO because these soybeans were harvested in my big aunt’s farm. A trend called ‘Black Food’ has been popular in Korea for a long time and it’s believed that black food is good for the hair as well as the heart. I’m neither a vegetarian nor a celiac, but I like eating healthy and experimenting with different flours so that I’d know how different flours would work in baking in the circumstance where you have to substitute one for another. But if you’re in Istanbul, send me an email and I’ll give you some because I have a lot!

I first used this mix when making banana bread just to realise that the soybeans give quite a powerful taste, so this time I used it moderately. Since I had only one egg, I had to cut all the measurements in half. As I was using persimmon for the sweetness, I added grape molasses for extra sweetness.

Oh well, it looked like it was all going into a fruit basket, so I popped in some dried cranberries as well. It’s interesting how food turns out better when cooking with the heart instead of recipes. But I was VERY surprised when I learned that someone had already tried it and that the someone was David Lebovitz (recipe), one of my favourite chefs. He improvised the original recipe from Good to the Grain by combining dark chocolate. Everyone adds a bit of their personality to the existing recipe and  tonka beans I got from a chef friend sprang to my mind. Magically the recipe by a like-minded person was almost the same as what I did, and for your convenience, I doubled the measurements in the recipe below so that you don’t have to do the math.

So here is my own recipe with different kinds of flours and sweet ingredients, but it’s very similar to David Lebovitz, whether or not it’s a good thing; disappointed that it wasn’t original, but happy that my idea wasn’t that far out. I doubt that you would have soy four in your pantry so please feel free to substitute it for another flour like almond flour or buckwheat. Have fun baking this awesome muffins, don’t let birds eat all the persimmons and welcome a HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015!

Chocolate Persimmon Muffins
with Black Flours

Ingredients

1 cup (150g) buckwheat flour
1/2 cups (210g) wholewheat flour
1/2 cup black flour (or a mix of almond meal, cornmeal, etc.)
1/4 (50g) unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tsp vanilla extract or 1/2 tsp tonka bean
a handful of dried cranberries

1/2 stick (115g) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup (50g) dark brown sugar
1/4 cup (50g) grape molasses
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup (120g) plain yogurt
1 persimmon, pureed (sifted through a strainer)

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF (180ºC) and grease a muffin tin.
2. In a mixing bowl, cream the butter with the brown sugar until light and creamy for three to five minutes.
3. Whisk in the eggs one at a time and add the yogurt, then the persimmon puree.
4. Sift together all of the dry ingredients into a bowl (pressing through any big bits of grains and then tilt it into the mixture) and the cranberries.
5. Gently mix till almost combined and scoop the batter into the muffin tins and bake for 25-30mins.
6.Let the muffins cool for a few minutes no matter how tempted you are! Then transfer them onto a cooling rack.