In honor of our upcoming trip to Belarus (i.e. Meeting The Boyfriend's Family For The First Time) my attention for all-things baking has centered around buckwheat. (Eastern Europeans eat buckwheat like Americans eat Cheerios.) If there's one book on my shelf that saves the day when a random sack of flour (buckwheat, teff, spelt) is found in the cupboard, its Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. And she had just the thing - Chocolate Buckwheat Muffins.
Boyce's recipe actually calls for persimmons, but that is not in on the regular rotation of our fruit bowl, so it got left out of the fun. The muffins were delicious nonetheless. Every time a baking recipe works out for me, I have to say I'm a bit shocked. I'm not a baker by nature. I like to improvise, I'm okay with ambiguity, and I can be found to have little patience in the kitchen. But my ever-piqued curiosity wouldn't let me take another pass at the bag of buckwheat without giving this recipe a shot.
And I'm telling you, buckwheat loves chocolate. Both are sweet yet bitter, and something about the depth of the chocolate made buckwheat immensely interesting, giving it almost a nutty quality.
Now that I know how nicely these once-miscellaneous bags of random flours play with the more extolled items in my larder, I'll be grabbing for them more often. (Recipe can be found here.)
Posts
