Pear-Ginger Muffins

I love these muffins! This recipe is from Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking: Recipes and Techniques for Succcessful Home Baking. It's an excellent cookbook -- I highly recommend it. The original recipe is also available on the Williams-Sonoma website.

As usual, I made a few changes to the recipe. The main change I made to this recipe is that I do not consider brown sugar to be a dry ingredient. Whenever I've added brown sugar to the dry ingredients, I seem to get some clumps, so I always add it to the moist ingredients. Here's the recipe as I made it:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 heaping teaspoon ground ginger

2/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger

2 large eggs

2/3 cup packed dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon peeled and grated (or minced) fresh ginger

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

1 cup whole milk

1 large pear, chopped

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Prepare a muffin pan by coating the muffin cups with cooking spray.

In a bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ground ginger. Stir in about 1/3 cup of the chopped crystallized ginger.

In another bowl, whisk the eggs until blended. Add the brown sugar and the fresh ginger. Whisk in the melted butter and then the milk. Pour over the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula just until moistened. Fold in the pear.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin cups, evenly dividing the batter over all 12 cups. Sprinkle the remaining crystallized ginger over the tops. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, about 15 minutes. Let cool in the pan on a wire cooling rack for 2 minutes, then remove the muffins from the pan and continue cooling on the wire rack. Serve warm. Makes 12 muffins.

Prep time (not including baking): about 30 minutes