Nutty Magdalenas

I have two confessions to make. The first is that I have a terrible tendency to wander around my place, looking for something to eat. It starts the moment I wake up, and no leftover cake or cookie is safe. And continues throughout the day as I forage and wander around, eating handfuls of nuts, chocolate chips, fruits and berries, or whatever else I can get my hands one.

The other confession is that few years ago, I was in the states at a cookbook store, and I picked up one of the books on cupcakes. When the sales clerk told me how many copies it had sold, they had to send someone running down the aisle to catch the eyeballs that had fallen out of my head.

I couldn’t even calculate how much money that was in my ever-shrinking brain, but I stocked up on cupcake liners and muffin tins, and decided that when I got home I’d knock out a cupcake book. Then, I’d retire to a sunny island and spend the rest of my life in a place where my biggest fear wasn’t bank tellers or supermarket cashiers, but wondering – “What’s taking that waiter so dang long with my next mai tai?”

However I never pursued it because as much as I like cupcakes, my heart just wasn’t it in. (And since we’re being honest here, the idea of scrubbing muffin tins for a year wasn’t all that appealing either.) So since I am decidedly downward mobile, I abandoned the project altogether. And now, all I have to show for it are a few thousand cupcake liners and muffin tins in every conceivable size, shape, and material, hand-carried from the United States of America.

I also brought back a few jars of marshmallow cream thinking they’d make an interesting frosting for some of my cupcake ventures. But at least I put one of those to good use. And considering the list of ingredients, I don’t have to worry about any of the rest going bad, say, for the next 39 years.

Since quitting the cupcake project, I spent some of the time I would have spent scrubbing muffin tins, roaming around the house, snacking on various odds and ends. I was attracted to this recipe in My Barcelona Kitchen, a cookbook about the foods of that amazing Catalan city, written by Sophie Ruggles, an Australian who moved there, opened a restaurant, and now teaches cooking classes.

Magdalenas are kind of like muffins – or cupcakes (I’m not sure of the difference, which I guess is required if you’re going to write a book on cupcakes), except these Magdalenas de frutos secos have no butter. Instead, they rely on olive oil as well as ground nuts, which replace much of the flour, which Sophie claims put them into the “healthy” category.

But I’m not a total rube and did learn from her book that the Spanish say “Frutos secos” for mixed nuts, like the French say “Fruits secs”, both of which translate to “dried fruits.” No one’s been ever to explain that to me, although I’m sure if it’s done in both countries there has to be a reasonable explanation. Kinda like the one about why I have a few cases of cupcake liners and a cabinet full of muffin – or cupcake – tins.

Related Links and Recipes

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