I’ve recently started to play golf, or more accurately to take lessons. I’ve been told golf is the most technical sport there is, that it’s a very “deep” game, that once one starts it’s impossible to stop… All I know is that my pro annoyingly never seems to perspire, even under the Nassau midday sun, and is constantly yelling at me not to swing like a girl when I sweatily fail to hit the impossibly small white round thing in front of me. Since he takes the mickey in a great Bahamian accent and the lessons do appear to be working I forgive him (just). The one ball out of a hundred that I hit with a satisfying ting and launch in vaguely the right direction really does make me forget about the other ninety-seven frustrating clonks and the two yelps from nearby golfers.
I’m not sure if this is the start of the golf bug (god help us) but I do know that I’m going to have to lose a fair amount of self-irony if I’m going to play this game anywhere near the States, especially on a national holiday. It must be a wonderful thing to have a sense of national pride – I’m middle-class British, we don’t do that – but changing up the hole flags for the July 4th PGA tourney to little stars and stripes just gives me a kneejerk cringe. And on Friday I happened to be at the clubhouse with Abe Lincoln. He, or rather an impressively bearded impersonator, had been flown in for six days to entertain at the US ambassador’s Independence Day party and – naturally – was playing a round on his day off.
Blueberry streusel muffins
- 150g fresh blueberries
- 40g caster sugar
- 100g plain or all-purpose flour
- 1 heaped tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- pinch salt
- 40g caster sugar
- 35g butter
- 100g or 1/4 cup yoghurt
- 100ml milk (or replace yoghurt and milk with 200ml buttermilk)
- 1 beaten egg
For the streusel find a tablespoon or 30g of each of the following:
- pecans
- brown sugar
- flour
- cold butter
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C and grease a muffin tray (this amount makes about six).
Make the streusel topping by rubbing in the tablespoon butter to the tablespoon flour, then stirring in the brown sugar and chopped pecans. Set aside for a moment.
Wash the blueberries and dry them on kitchen towel. Sprinkle with a bit of flour so they don’t all sink to the bottom of the muffins.
Combine the dry ingredients for the muffins in a medium bowl – flour, salt, bicarb, baking powder and sugar. Melt the butter and stir in the yoghurt and milk and half the beaten egg. Now add the wet to the dry ingredients, stirring very briefly and ignoring lumps so as to not end up with heavy muffins. Stir in the floured blueberries and spoon into the prepared muffin pan. Sprinkle and pat a generous amount of streusel topping on each muffin and bake for 20 minutes.
