Hello old friends! After a bit of a hiatus (a little bit of a writing rut, reading rut, cooking rut and enjoying life outside the blog) I am returning to bookcooker. I hope you will bear with me as slowly get back on the horse! I made these pretty little muffins a while ago, when the recipe appeared in the New York Times. It was perfect timing, because I had recently read two (very different) books that this recipe was perfect for - Where'd You Go Bernadette and Bringing Up the Bodies. Where'd You Go, by Maria Semple is a unique novel where much of the story is told through letters, emails and various other documents, like memos. It is the very funny story of a daughter's search for her brilliant but more than slightly off mother (Bernadette) set in the milieu of affluent and politically correct Seattle. A disastrous chain of events is set off when Bernadette gets into a dispute with her obnoxious neighbor concerning some unruly blackberry bushes on her property (inspiration for the blackberry part of the muffin.) Bringing Up the Bodies is Hilary Mantel's riveting second book in her series of books about Henry VIII's right hand man - Thomas Cromwell. This book follows the downfall of Anne Boleyn - and while this tale has been told many times before, unsurprisingly Mantel brings new wit and intelligence to the story. While Anne is certainly a compelling distraction, the story is really about Thomas Cromwell - his relationship to the mercurial king and how he manages to survive yet another upheaval in the house of Tudor. Those around Cromwell give him the nickname "Crumb", hence the crumb part of the muffin. A two for one recipe was the perfect impetus to get me off my bum and back to blogging. Here we go.
