Bird Flight

What can I do with leftover poppy seed filling or nut filling? These muffins may be your answer! They are quick and easy to make and even freeze well. I had some of both of these fillings leftover after making filled Czech Christmas cookies. Other recipes that may leave such leftovers include Czech kolache (koláče), filled sweet yeast-based buns (buchty), or even strudel (závin).

This recipe produces a very basic vanilla muffin. Feel free to add in some other flavors, if you like. For example, a touch of cinnamon in the batter when using walnut filling. Or lemon zest, if using poppy seed filling. If you don’t have unbleached pastry flour (or hladká mouka), any firmer basic muffin recipe should likely work, similarly.

The recipe below requires up to ¾ cup filling. I have not tried using other types of filling, so can’t vouch for their success. If you do, please let me know how they turned out in the comments section below.

Ingredients (for 12 regular-sized muffins):

• 250 g hladka mouka (unbleached pastry flour)
• 100 g granulated sugar (or a bit more if fillings aren’t that sweet)
• 7 g (1 ½ tsp) baking powder
• 1 packet (8 or 9 g) real vanilla sugar (or 1 ½ tsp vanilla extract)
• Optional: Additional flavors (i.e. cinnamon, lemon zest, rum)
• 200 ml of milk
• 80 g melted butter, still a bit warm
• 2 eggs
• Cold poppy seed filling and/or walnut filling formed into balls
• Optional: Poppy seeds and/or chopped nuts for muffin tops
• Optional: Confectioner’s sugar for dusting muffin tops

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 180 C (355 F). In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine flour, sugars, and baking powder. Add eggs, milk, and lukewarm butter and mix well. The batter should be thick, but not pasty.

Into the bottoms of very well-greased or paper lined muffin molds, distribute all of the batter between 12 regular-sized muffin molds. Then put a ball of well-chilled filling (about 2 teaspoons worth) in the middle of the batter in each mold, pressing them most of the way (but not all the way) into the batter. In the end, the molds should not be more than ¾ full. If you’re using some poppy seed filling and some walnut filling, consider sprinkling some dry poppy seeds (or chopped walnut) on top to mark which muffins have which filling – unless you like a surprise. The filling balls will sink into the batter as the muffins bake.

Bake muffins for about 20 minutes, or until tops are golden brown in color and toothpick test is clean. After cooling completely, you can dust the muffin tops with confectioner’s sugar.