Muffins Craze...

I had been baking muffins recently. Not that I like to eat muffins alot but cos' I find muffins cute, convenient and much simpler where I can spare the time and energy to bake during weekdays when the itch to bake sets in... ;)

Now that christmas is coming, I'm planning to bake cookies and cakes to give away! Somehow ever since I started baking, whenever I see bakeries selling cookies and cakes, and if knowing I know how to make myself, I can't help wanting to go back home and try myself instead of buying it. This christmas, I'm thinking of trying more colourful decorations for the cookies, if time allows. Hopefully I can get more creative than previous years, and produce nicer, more tasty treats. :)

Here are some of the muffins I baked.

This is a simple mixed-in muffin with carrot and orange juice. The recipe was obtained from the same book mentioned in the previous post - Cakes and bakes by Hamlyn. The result was not what I expected. The taste was not bad, but I find the muffin too moist. I'm not sure if it was due to me shredding the carrot instead of grating it, thus it produces alot of water. When the muffin was baked, I could not see any carrots, but orange rind only. I think I should have added more flour, or more oil instead of liquid ingredients. Anyway this is a good combination to consider for a healthy muffin and i would probably add in carrots to another orange muffin recipe which I'm going to introduce below.

Noticed some brown spots on top? Those were white chocolate chips. Sprinkled onto some of them but taste wasn't prominent. This is a good and yummy recipe from Florence's blog after having tried different recipes before. This time, I made quite a few modifications to the original recipe. I halved the recipe, used canola oil only instead of half oil and half butter, reduced the amount of oil as I felt that the one I made the last time was too moist and oily, as I personally prefer not too moist muffins. Just cutting a bit of oil works just as fine. I also omited the chocolate swirl as i was lazy to wash extra bowls. Wanted to make it as simple as possible. :P

I'm able to make 12 mini muffins and 4 heart-shaped cakes from the heart-shape mould. The 12 minis were for my mum to bring to her tea break with her friends. :) I told her that the heart-shape muffins was for her afternoon Sunday tea accompanied with the rose buds for her to brew some rose tea. But she didnt drink that though. :P



Ingredients:

• 3/4 cups plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 45 g sugar
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 small egg
• 62.5 ml orange juice }
• 62.5 ml buttermilk } Just a guage, not very accurate though
• 40 ml canola oil
• tsp vanilla essence
• grated orange zest of half orange

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 190 degree celsius.
2. Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
3. n a separate mixing bowl, whisk together egg, buttermilk, orange juice, oil, vanilla essence and orange zest.
4. Pour the egg mixture into the bowl of dry ingredient. using a wooden spoon, stir them gently until well combined, forming a uniformly moist batter. Do not over-stir.
5. Fill each muffin cup to 80% full.
6. Bake in the oven for 10 minutes, then rotate the pan for more uniform baking. Then bake for another 5 to 10 minutes or until a tester inserted comes out clean. (Note: my baking time is shorter as I used mini muffin pan. For regular muffin pan, bake for 12 minutes, rotate, then bake for about another 10 to 15 minutes)

Adapted and modified from: Do What I Like

Can yield about 14 mini muffins or 6 regular muffins.

Ok this is the last muffin I made.
This was made before the mini orange. Saw this cute little pandan chiffon from one of a chinese blog, with lots of nice bakes. However for this muffin, I find the taste ok only, cos' it used pandan paste only. It would be better if pandan juice or coconut milk was added. And I guess too much of the pandan paste was added so made the colour looked artificial. But I like the cute dome shape! :)