Pistachio & Apricot Muffins

Lorrie gave me a new book last week called 500 Cupcakes: The Only Cupcake Compendium You'll Ever Need. We saw this at Borders earlier while looking for a cookbook for a gift and thought it was interesting. So Lorrie's mom was visiting us last week but she was leaving Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning, like before the paper even gets there early. I thought it would be nice to make her some muffins to eat on her trip. 500 Cupcakesnot only has cupcake recipes but also muffins (the author considers them a subset of cupcakes. Whatever.) Lorrie likes pistachio nuts so I thought the Pistachio and Apricot Muffin recipe on page 274 might be a good recipe to try.

It wasn't. The recipe calls for 4 cups of self-rising flour, dried apricots (though soaked in brandy and then drained), sugar, and pistachio nuts versus a small amount of butter, buttermilk, and a couple of eggs. Mixing the batter was like mixing paste, very tough. Still I got it to the point where it was just mixed and into the pan. Once baked they were dry, a little heavy, and the flour overpowered the ingredients. Not horrible mind you, they were edible but they weren't the apricoty-pistachio goodness I was hoping for.

That said, I think this can be the basis for a good recipe. I will go through and see if I can improve the recipe. I looked around in the book and this seems to be the only one so far that called for that much flour so I haven't given up on the book.