Plum & Hazelnut Coffee Cake Muffins

Frosted Prune Plums, a photo by Ayala Moriel on Flickr.

These muffins are made coffee-cake style, with the fruit on top. Spelt flour gives it a nutty texture, which greatly complements the roasted hazelnut meal that is incorporated into the recipe. The result is a moist, melt-in-your-mouth muffin that's not too sweet and is delicious with your morning coffee, or with a slice of cheese on the side for a light lunch or snack. What I like doing is prepare all the ingredients the night before - keep the dry ingredients covered on the counter, and the wet ingredients refrigerated. When I wake up at 6:30am, all I need to do is preheat the oven, mix the ingredients and pop it in the oven. By the time everyone in the house is dressed up and ready to start their day (usually shortly after 7am), the muffins are out of the oven and breakfast can be served!
You may say it's only the kind of thing someone who works from home can muster, but I've been doing this when I was working at an office job in my early twenties that started at 7am. Of course then I would wake up at 5:30...

2 cups spelt flour*
1/2 cup ground roasted hazelnuts
1/4 cup grapeseed oil
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon    
1 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 large eggs 
1tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup buttermilk
6 fresh and ripe Italian prune plums, pitted and cut into small chunks**

-Preheat oven to 375F.
- Beat eggs in a bowl. Add oil and buttermilk.
- Combine flour, ground hazeulnuts, cinnamon, baking powder and salt in a bowl.- Gently fold the milk mixture into the flour mixture until just combined. Avoid over-stirring.
- Spoonfuls of the mixture into greased or buttered muffin tins.
- Spread plum pieces on top and gently press them down.
- Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with cinnamon and sugar.
- Bake for 16-18 minutes or until a toothpick or a cake tester comes out clean.

These muffins are best served warm. If you can't gobble up all 12 muffins you can keep them for up to 3 days, but I do recommend cutting them into half lengthwise and warming them up in the oven for 5 minutes before serving. 

* You can also use whole wheat or white flour, but of course the texture would be different. 
** you can also use frozen ones; I had mine for about a year in an airtight container and they were as good as fresh!

Le Parfum de Thérèse

One of my new discoveries during my trip to Israel was Le Parfum de Thérèse, which I enjoyed on those hot dry spring days when the wind from the desert blows steadily and hydration is a question of sanity, not just simple survival necessity.

Le Parfum de Thérèse is both fluid and stable. Slippery like a cool veil of satin, moist and refreshing like a film of cucumber and aloe vera gel on a sun-warmed skin verging on a burn. Yet it breathes out coolness like a stone-house in the summer, and has the dry sensuality of a marble rock. It is so utterly Mediterranean and is most magical when worn on a hot and dry desert day – than its true beauty glimmers and shines.

With sparkling top notes of basil, lemon, melon and peach, Le Parfum de Therese was revolutionary for its time and preceded the watery trend of the 1990’s by a few impressive decades (and also is far superior in my opinion to any of those). The hedionic jasmine heart is sheer and uplifting, and creates a unique feeling of reviving euphoria. Some of the rose heart notes remain until the very dry down, which is a simple and gorgeous chypre accord of oakmoss and labdanum. Le Parfum de Thérèse shares a lot of its charm with the more widely available Diorella, only is somewhat deeper and more complex in my opinion. Though I barely notice any of the plum and leather notes that it shares with Femme (another great creation of Roudniska), it has a similar sensuality and warmth that is softly captivating and sensual.

Le Parfum de Thérèse reminds me of all that is summer – folding the tart grapevine leaves stuffed with rice and spearmint on a marble-tiled patio and the scent of laundry drying fast in the desert wind, and enjoying the coolness of fragrant melons in the evening.