Fig and Stilton Muffins #MuffinMonday

Not quite savory and not quite sweet, these fig and Stilton muffins are the perfect marriage of fruit and cheese in a fluffy quick bread. Serve for breakfast, tea time or as an accompaniment to a light lunch.

I adore fresh figs but they are so hard to come by. My stand in, soft dried figs, can’t replace them but they are so much better than no figs at all. I always assumed that they were dehydrated to the soft state I bought them in, but for the very first time, I actually read the package as I prepared to bake these muffins.

It says, and I quote: Partially rehydrated dried figs.

Which brought up a question for me. Why dry them out completely if you are going to add moisture back at a later date? I spent a couple of days down the rabbit hole of internet research. Who knew dried fig production was such a popular subject for scholarly papers! The best explanation I came up with was that dried figs have a longer shelf life but people want to buy them soft. Hence the two-step process.

The figs are picked when at optimal ripeness then dried completely. They are gently rehydrated which plumps them up and makes them edible again. If you’ve never tried them, they have a similar texture to dried apricots, in other words, they are chewy and sticky. Not hard at all except for the very end of the stems.

Fig and Stilton Muffins

If you don’t have access to Stilton, substitute your favorite strong flavored blue cheese that crumbles well. The sweet sticky figs are the perfect complement to a strong blue cheese.

Ingredients
2 cups or 250g all purpose flour
1/4 cup or 50g sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup or 180ml buttermilk
1/2 cup or 120ml canola or other light oil, plus extra for greasing pan
2 large eggs
5 1/3 oz or 150g soft dried figs (about 9-10 figs)
3 1/2 oz or 100g Stilton cheese

Method
Preheat oven to 350°F or 180°C and generously grease cups and top of 12-cup muffin pan with oil. The fig and cheese make these more likely to stick than other muffins.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt together.

Remove any hard stems on the figs with a sharp knife. Chop the figs roughly and set aside at least 12 pieces to pop on top of the muffins before baking.

Add the rest to the flour mixture and fold gently until they are coated with flour, separating any bits that are stuck together.

Trim any hard rind off of your cheese and discard. Crumble the rest with a fork.

In another bowl, whisk together buttermilk, canola and eggs.

Add all the wet mixture to the dry ingredients mixing bowl.

Fold just until dry ingredients are just moistened.  You may still see some flour.

Now fold in the crumbled Stilton, saving a little bit for topping each muffin.

Divide your batter relatively evenly between the 12 muffin cups.  Top with the reserved fig and Stilton pieces.

Bake 20-25 minutes or until muffins are golden.

Remove from oven and let cool a few minutes before removing muffins from the pan. I suggest running a dull knife around the sides of the muffin first to aid in removal.

Enjoy!

Check out the other great muffin recipes my Muffin Monday friends are sharing today! 

• Crumb Topped Peach Muffins from Palatable Pastime
• Fig and Stilton Muffins from Food Lust People Love
• Jerk Chicken Sausage and Cheese Muffins from Passion Kneaded
• Lemon Poppyseed Ricotta Muffins from Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Savory Cheese Muffins from A Day in the Life on the Farm

#MuffinMonday is a group of muffin loving bakers who get together once a month to bake muffins. You can see all of our lovely muffins by following our Pinterest board. Updated links for all of our past events and more information about Muffin Monday can be found on our home page.

Pin these Fig and Stilton Muffins! 

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Fresh Fig Blue Cheese Tarts #FoodieExtravaganza

Flakey buttery puff pastry is the perfect crust for these fresh fig blue cheese tarts with rosemary and honey. Crunchy, sweet and salty, these little tarts are one of my favorite recipes to make with fresh figs.

This month my Foodie Extravaganza group is celebrating the start of National Fig Week by sharing fig recipes. When the theme was announced a few months back I was pretty sure that I was going to have to use dried figs, which are good – I love their sticky selves as a snack.

But I lucked out! My local shop had some lovely fresh figs. With some French Roquefort cheese and a sprig of rosemary from my own garden, I was in business.

Fresh Fig Blue Cheese Tarts

If you’ve never tried the combination of figs and blue cheese you are in for a treat. This works in salads as well as baked goods. Add a drizzle of honey, some rosemary and a little heat to this special combo. I served these tarts as a main course, with a lovely salad of greens tossed with a sharp vinaigrette dressing.

Ingredients
1 package puff pastry
3 1/2 oz or 100g blue cheese
4-5 fresh figs, sliced
1 sprig rosemary
1 1/2 teaspoons minute tapioca, divided
6 tablespoons honey

Method
Preheat oven to 400°F or 200°C.  Line six small tart pans with baking parchment. Roll pastry out big enough for your six small tart pans.

Fit puff pastry into lined tart pans, and trim, leaving a little overhang. Add one more circle baking parchment and fill the tart crusts with baking beads or dried beans.

Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes or until puffed and golden.

Leave to cool for a few minutes, then remove the baking beads and parchment inside the crust.

Crumble half of the blue cheese into the bottom of the tarts.

Sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon tapioca in each crust.

Top with the sliced figs. Crumble on the rest of the blue cheese. Sprinkle each tart with a few rosemary needles.

Drizzle with 1 tablespoon of honey each.

Reduce oven temperature to 350°F or 180°C and bake until cheese is melted and figs are warmed through. They get quite juicy but this is where the magic of the minute tapioca comes in, slightly thickening the fresh fig juice as the tart filling bubbles in the heat.

Leave to cool completely before serving. This also gives the tapioca extra time to finish its thickening process.  Enjoy!

Check out all the other delicious fig recipes we are sharing! Many thanks to this month's host, Camilla of Culinary Adventures with Camilla.

• Fig/Anjeer Milk Shake by Sneha's Recipe
• Fig and Walnut Bread by Caroline's Cooking
• Fresh Fig Blue Cheese Tarts by Food Lust People Love
• Sourdough Barley Bread with Figs and Pecans by Karen's Kitchen Stories
• Steamed Figgy Pudding by A Day in the Life on the Farm
• Warm Potato Salad with Tea-Steeped Figs by Culinary Adventures with Camilla

Foodie Extravaganza celebrates obscure food holidays or shares recipes with the same ingredient or theme every month.

Posting day is always the first Wednesday of each month. If you are a blogger and would like to join our group and blog along with us, come join our Facebook group Foodie Extravaganza. We would love to have you!

If you're a reader looking for delicious recipes, check out our Foodie Extravaganza Pinterest Board!

 Pin it!

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Gram’s Fig Preserves

When figs are in season, make this simple recipe for fresh fig preserves, and enjoy sweet figs all year long! Gram's fig preserves are great spread on a piece of buttered toast, spooned over pound cake or even baked into her special fig spice cake. 

This is a hard post to write without getting maudlin but I will try.  As my handful of Twitter followers and Facebook friends know, we spent last weekend in New Iberia, Louisiana with my aged grandmother. She is 98 1/2 years old which means (thanks to my friend, Jacky’s Gran, who started counting the year she was in at 93, rather than birthdays) she is in her 99^th year. Pretty impressive, I think!

My father and aunt have organized a lovely nurse/caretaker to come in Monday through Friday to care for her while my uncle, who lives with her, is off at work. On the evenings and weekends, he is in charge and is doing a good job. As we said to him, upon questions about the medications, he hasn’t killed her yet, so we figure he knows what he is doing. (Why he didn’t throw us out, I do not know.) Goodness knows, she has two different sets of pills, morning and evening, and if he can keep those straight, more power to him! We are grateful!

We arrived around 3:45 in the afternoon on Friday and her lovely nurse/caretaker, Tina, was still there to greet us. Bless her, then she stayed late just to make conversation and get to know us because her normal hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  She calls my grandmother Ms. Margaret.

Her real name is Marguerite but throughout my childhood, her friends called her Mag or Maggie. On official records, her name is Margaret because when she started school back in 1919, French was forbidden and Marguerite would have been part of that prohibition. Her name was changed to Margaret to conform to the no-French rule. Imagine!

Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother did not learn English till they started school at six years old and the system - and the teachers - tried to stamp it out of them. The shame of that was that the next two generations of Acadiana French children were not allowed to speak their mother tongue at school and gradually it died out. (My grandparents’ generation still spoke it amongst themselves because it is hard to smother a child’s mother tongue.) I think my grandparents’ generation was the last to speak it fluently in Louisiana. I’ve been told that the public schools are teaching French again, but it is not the same. More's the pity.

Anyhoo, Tina got us talking about the character that my grandmother must have been when she was younger and telling stories on her. Oh, my goodness, the stories we could tell. Gram was the best grandmother ever. No was not in her vocabulary. “Gram, can we have some baby aspirin? (They tasted like orange Tic Tacs and we loved them.) The answer was “Sure. Help yourself.”

“Gram, can we borrow your steak knives? We want to have a knife throwing contest in the yard.”  - “You know where they are.”  I don’t even remember her saying, “just be careful.”  But, in fairness, possibly she did. And we lit bonfires, with permission – we mostly did ask, to our credit - and took group bubble baths and climbed trees, higher than was ever safe. And once we even took off walking to my other grandmother’s house a few miles away. Why? Who the heck remembers? Unsupervised much? Blissfully so. 

While cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen this past weekend, I discovered a drawer full of her old cookbooks and asked if I might take them home to look through them more carefully. (Cousins reading this, please know that I WILL RETURN THEM.) You know that the woman who let us take her steak knives in the yard for a knife-throwing contest (which, by the way, ended up with a knife up in my foot and a tetanus shot for yours truly) did not tell me no.  So I have a whole box of mostly cr*p cookbooks with the occasional gem in her handwriting, which is what I am looking for.

I discovered this one before we even left her kitchen.  Written on the front of a Steen Syrup giveaway pamphlet in my grandmother's handwriting. 

“Gram,” I said.  “Is this your recipe for the fig preserves you always made?”  “Yes,” she said.  It couldn’t be more simple.

Gram’s Fig Preserves

It doesn't get any easier than this - just two ingredients - figs and sugar - in a two to one ratio, for a whole lot of wonderful.

Ingredients - to make two pint jars

2.2 pounds or 1 kg or 5 1/2 generous cups of fresh figs

2 3/4 cups or 620g sugar

Method

Rinse the fresh figs well and discard the rinsing water. If your figs have hard stems, cut them off and discard.

Pour the sugar over the drained figs in a heavy-bottomed pot.

Put it on a medium flame, covered. You don't need to add water as this gets really juicy fairly quickly but that is a good thing. Cook for a while, perhaps half an hour, stirring very gently occasionally. You do not want the figs to break up. Gram always had whole figs in her preserve jars and so should you.

After about the first half hour, when all the sugar has dissolved, you can turn the heat up to medium high and take the lid off.  Cook until the syrup reduces by at least half.

Meanwhile, sterilize your jars/lids by pouring boiling water in them.  Then put one metal teaspoon in each jar.  This will keep the jars from breaking when you pour the boiling hot preserves in them.

2 half pint jars and 1 pint jar

When I cooked this down, I got 2 whole pints of preserved figs out of 5 1/2 cups or 1 kilo of figs and 2 3/4 cups or 620g of sugar.

Using a jam jar funnel, divide the figs and boiling syrup evenly between the jars.  Screw the lids on very tightly, with a dry towel and set them upside down.  As they cool, a vacuum seal will form and the preserves will be safe to eat for several weeks.

We bought the fresh figs at the Farmers’ Market on Main Street in New Iberia because Gram’s tree was hit by lightening a number of years ago and her replacement trees (planted with cuttings from my other grandmother’s tree!) are not producing yet. I’ve decided that the best thing I could do was to pack them up nicely and mail them on to her to enjoy. When you are 98 and 1/2, people should be making fig preserves for you. Don’t you agree?

Enjoy!