Plum, Marzipan and Cinnamon Muffins

These were sooo delicious…..moist muffins flavoured with orange, cinnamon and almond, and topped with roasted plums….

The first step is to bake red plums with a little sugar and a cinnamon stick to make a compote.

The muffin is assembled using the usual method of mixing wet ingredients with dry by hand. This recipe included a few unusual "wet" ingredients: grated marzipan and some of the plum compote. I used homemade almond paste, which is less sweet than marzipan, and that worked well as it melted into the batter during baking and provided almond flavour without adding too much sugar. The plum slices in the compote needed to be broken down a little before adding to the batter to distribute them more evenly.

The muffins were a little dense “ I’m starting to wonder if the Robin Hood Cake & Pastry flour I used is the best substitute for British "plain flour” “ but they were still moist. I do wish they had more of the roasted plum pieces in them...... not an issue when eating them with the compote, but I ran out of compote before the muffins were gone (that's how good the compote is!) so they were eaten plain.

The recipe made 16 standard sized muffins that baked in 20 min.