Cranberry Lemon Muffins

My local grocery store had a sale on bags of frozen fruit - so of course I'm going to stock up! They are perfect for my work muffins. Blueberry was gone so I had to stick with festive cranberry. I actually prefer frozen cranberries while baking, luckily. I googled around for a simple cranberry muffin recipe and came across this Cranberry Lemon Muffins recipe from a local grocery store, Fiesta Farms. Perfect for a cold afternoon. Here's my adaptation.

First mix the dry ingredients: 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup white sugar (down from 1 whole cup in the original recipe), 3 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt. Add the zest of one lemon. Then cut the lemon in half and juice it, so that you get 2 Tbsp of lemon juice. Stir this into 1 cup milk, and let it sit - the milk will get sour, and in fact quite clumpy, but this is a good thing - like using buttermilk it will help the raising and give it a lemony kick. Meanwhile, beat 2 eggs in a small bowl, then mix in 1/3 cup oil and the soured milk.

Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix until almost incorporated, then throw in 1 1/2 cups cranberries. Mix gently. Pour into muffin tins - it made a good 16 so have two ready. I topped mine with Swedish pearl sugar and cooked @400 for about 20 minutes - maybe a bit longer since the cranberries were frozen. The tops were exploding with cranberry goodness and they were faintly lemony, but not too strong. I may add more zest next time to up the citrus flavour. Perfect with coffee, tea, jam and clotted cream - if you're lucky enough to have some!

Coffee Chocolate Muffins

I was looking for a simple muffin recipe I could make with pantry staples to bring for an island outing - the Toronto islands, that is, not very tropical but always fabulous fun in the summer. We sit on the beach, gorge ourselves on snacks, play some cards and badminton... except for the wicked sunburn on part of my leg, it was lovely! Before I left, I filled a tin with some Coffee Chocolate Muffins, grabbed a few small jars of jam (strawberry and blackcurrant) and set out for the ferry docks. Note: I made the recipe a little differently because I was browsing through many different recipes for ideas.

Dry ingredients: 2 cups whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup sugar, 1/3 cup cocoa, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda and a pinch of salt. In a separate bowl, the wet ingredients: 1 egg, 1/2 cup oil, 1 cup strongly brewed coffee (at room temperature) and 1/2 tsp vanilla.

Mix the two together, and when they're almost incorporated, add in 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips. This is to make sure you don't overmix. Never overmix your muffin batter! Mmm, this batter was a lovely brown colour and looked super chocolatey!

Bake at 375 for about 20 minutes. And voila - chocolate muffins just waiting to be eaten slathered with jam. You don't taste the coffee too much, it just helps the chocolate taste even better. To get coffee flavour you'd have to add instant coffee granules or coffee flavouring. These were simple, decadent and - most important for a picnic - portable! And they helped me use up some coffee beans that were too weak for my taste. Win-win.

Prairie Honey Oatmeal Muffins

More muffins! I wanted to try something new, so I flipped through the Complete Canadian Living Baking Book, a great bargain find at Winners, and picked out their Prairie Honey Oatmeal Muffins (p. 286). I guess the term 'prairie' means wholesome ingredients? I picked them because they seemed quite simple - and I had all the ingredients. After a delicious taco dinner at Grand Electric, I didn't want anything too fancy. Yes, readers, on Fridays we have an early dinner and come home and watch TV and make muffins. The epitome of cool.

First, stir 1 cup oats with 1 cup buttermilk, let sit 15 min. The recipe called for large-flake oats - I had quick, don't think it made too much of a difference. Also, my buttermilk, as usual, was just regular milk with some cider vinegar added to sour it. Yum. Mix the dry ingredients: 1 c whole wheat flour, 1.5 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp each baking soda and cinnamon, and 1/4 tsp salt.


The wet ingredients were stirred into the buttermilk/oat mixture: 1/3 cup each oil and honey, 1/4 cup brown sugar, and 1 egg, which were then added to the dry ingredients. It was a much thinner batter than I'm used to. Originally the recipe called for 1/3 cup sunflower seeds as well, but alas, the seeds I had in my freezer had gone bad (when they smell like Play-doh, throw them away!) so walnut pieces it was. Bake @375 for about 17 minutes.

No idea why the recipe said it made only 10 muffins - it made 12 easily. They had a nice crunchy top, and were super tender and fally-aparty - I guess because I'm used to 2 cups of flour, and these were half oats instead. Maybe the honey helped. Either way, they were sweet and delicious, and while a little plainer than I usually make, quite satisfying at breakfast/work break.

Chocolate Banana Muffins

Another week, another batch of muffins. The amount of banana muffins we eat is surely indicative of the fact that we never finish our bananas before they go brown - but we don't waste them, since our freezer is always bursting with bananas just waiting to be baked. But I felt a craving for chocolate too this time - and thanks to Nigella's simple Chocolate Banana Muffins, my dream became a delicious reality.

Nigella called these muffins "darkly elegant" - thanks to the 3 Tbsp cocoa added into the dry ingredients. The rest is pretty basic - 1 3/4 cup flour, 1 tsp baking soda. Only Nigella Lawson could make a simple muffin recipe seem so sexy.






Mash three bananas in a large bowl, and mix in 1/3 cup oil, 2 eggs and 1/2 cup brown sugar. And that's it - Nigella doesn't mess around with other spices, or even vanilla. But she very handily points out that there is no need to use fancy cafe muffin papers, those "tulip-skirted party frocks" - plain papers will work just fine.

Well, she was right on two counts. 1) These muffins are crazy moist - I left one out for days and it was still moist when I finally ate it and 2) these things would be damn good served after dinner with coffee! Now they are a bit plain, not too sweet and not too chocolatey - you could add more sugar, or some mini chocolate chips to spice them up. But for a simple, not-too-heavy snack, they are delish.

Stollen Muffins

I often get magazines from the library - we're usually only about a month behind and, well, they're free. Sometimes you find they've been tampered with - particularly with Food Network magazine, which comes with a removable booklet with 50 variations on some theme. But luckily for a recent holiday issue, the booklet was still attached - with fifty delicious muffin recipes. First up: Stollen Muffins.

I was excited about these because I really wanted to use the baking marzipan I found in a German shop on Roncesvalles. I've got a Swedish baking cookbook which is full of recipes that include almond paste, so I grabbed some when I finally found some. I figured this was an easy way to try it out. So I started by beating 1/3 cup of marzipan with 3/4 cup butter with 2/3 cup sugar.



This was actually more difficult than I had thought - the marzipan was quite hard, and it didn't really incorporate very well. It was definitely still in chunks. Oh well. After further beating in 2 eggs and 1 tsp each vanilla and almond extract, I mixed the dry ingredients in another bowl: 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt. The dry ingredients were then mixed into the butter, alternating with 1/3 cup milk. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

For a finishing touch, the muffins were brushed with melted butter and dusted with icing sugar. They were very dense, sweet, and almondy - but also surprisingly dry for something with tons of butter in it. But good! Just used to my oil-based cupcakes, I guess. Definitely not the healthy muffins I usually make. Like a dense pound cake. After looking at the Swedish recipes again, it seems marzipan is usually grated into batters - it is quite hard, no wonder I couldn't beat it into soft butter! It just meant you got a nice chunk of almond goodness in some bites. The good news is there is a chocolate/British candy store that carries the same marzipan, so I can try some Swedish recipes next time. Funny how this recipe was clearly based on German stollen but without the fruit or nuts...

Cranberry Orange Muffins

We had leftover fresh cranberries in the fridge. We needed muffins for work snacks. I put two and two together and voila - citrus muffins.

First step was whisking the wet ingredients together - 1/3 cup oil, 1 egg, the zest of one orange, and 2/3 cup orange juice. I juiced the orange I zested, and topped it up with a little with water to make the full amount. I also added a squeeze of lemon juice to keep the acidity. It would be pretty easy to make them vegan, since there's no milk or yogurt. I'm sure an egg replacer (flax seed, apple sauce, etc) would work just fine.

Next I whisked the dry ingredients - 2 cups whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, and a pinch of salt. The real trick to muffins is not to over-stir, so I stirred the batter until it was about 2/3 combined, then added the cranberries. By the time the cranberries were mixed in, the batter was just ready.

A note on cranberries - the frozen ones are very handy to use, but they can streak the batter with their red juice. I used fresh cranberries, since I had them, but they took some work - I cut them all in half, and had to go through them to throw away any mushy ones. Fresh cranberries are not attractive - they are hard, white, and taste horrible.

But magic - when they're cooked in muffins, they become the soft, red, juicy, tart berries we all know and love. I sprinkled sugar on top of them before baking, and it created a sugar crust, which was delicious. But because the recipe was so low in sugar, the bitterness of the orange zest was a little strong. Maybe don't zest an entire orange - I'm sure half would be fine. And while they stayed moist, they were a little crumbly. How could a moist muffin be crumbly? Well, I'm not sure. Second Cup muffins were always moist, but crumbled easily as well. A mystery for another day.

Banana Muffins

I make a LOT of muffins - I keep them in the freezer and take them out for the commute back home from work. I also make a lot of banana muffins - mostly because we eat a lot of bananas but also have quite a few go brown on us, in which case they get popped in the freezer to await becoming muffins. I usually follow a slightly modified version of the recipe from the good ol' Joy of Cooking (1997 ed. - the muffin page is caked with batter and taped into place, I may use it a lot...) but googled around for some changes awhile back and found this recipe, which claimed they were the EASIEST and the BEST - and the blogger had 1000+ comments to prove it. We're in the big leagues here - so let's try 'em out!

I love making the banana slurry. I mashed 3 bananas (usually pretty watery from having been frozen) with 1 egg, 1/4 cup oil (she had 1/3 cup melted margarine) and 1/3 cup sugar (she had 1/2 cup). You know me, always trying to be healthy. I also added in 1 tsp vanilla, just because.

The dry ingredients differed from the Joy of Cooking a little in the amount of floor - 1 1/2 cups instead of my standard 2 cups. What are we making here, cupcakes?! I also added in 1 tsp cinnamon - this recipe doesn't seem to have a lot of other flavourings, does it? The temperature was also at 350 instead of my standard 400. Hmmm. After adding some walnuts, I threw them in the oven and awaited the lovely banana smell to waft over to me.

No surprise, they turned out just fine. Don't know what else to say except everyone should bake muffins all the time - they make your house smell good, and they're ALWAYS better than whatever awful baked good offered by any/all coffee chains. Low-fat ones are better to keep frozen until the day you're going to eat them, but this means they are damn convenient for work snacks. And they're even better with chocolate chips in them...