TWD - Lemony Yoghurt Muffins

 

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Lemony Yoghurt Muffins.

This recipe is exactly what it says on the tin. Dorie encourages add ins, so I added some chopped cherries that I had frozen to preserve them when I went on holidays. 

What’s not to like about a good old fashioned uffin. The citrus flavour is amped up by rubbing the zest into the sugar before adding to the mixture.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Goat Cheese-Black Pepper Quick Bread

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Goats Cheese-Black Pepper Quick Bread.

This involves making a simple quick bread, and mixing through goats cheese chunks and chopped mint.

I quartered the recipe to make four muffins instead of a single large loaf.

This quick bread is absolutely delicious - I highly recommend it.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Carrot Muffins

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Carrot Muffins. These are not your average muffins in that there is quote a number of steps and ingredients that you probably don’t need to make muffins. That said, these muffins are delicious.

 I subbed date syrup for pomegranate molasses (because I had the former but not the latter), and for the dried fruit component, I used cranberries.

I recommend using your food processor if you have one to grate the carrots, because it saves an awful lot of time.

These muffins are attractive to look at and nice and moist to eat. They taste good, undoubtedly. However, they are a little fussier to make than your average muffins, so do bear that in mind if you decide to make them.

To see everyone’s bakes this week, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Mochaccino Muffins

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Mochaccino Muffins. As the name suggests, they are flavoured with chocolate and coffee. Coffee powder, coffee extract, cocoa and chocolate chips make up the flavours.

They are really tasty - not too dense, nice and moist inside:
 

Best of all, the washing up is minimal, as these are made without the aid of a mechanical mixer:

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

TWD - Grain and Seed Muffins

This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Grain and Seed Muffins.  These muffins contain a long list of healthy-ish ingredients and bake up into rather good savoury-sweet muffins:

Everyone suggested that these muffins were best served with butter, so that is what I did:

 I only made a quarter batch, replaced the wheat bran with more oats, and replaced the whole seeds with LSA for no reason other than that is what I had available.

These were good and I’d make them again.

To see what everyone else made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

Chidi’s Blueberry Muffins

I recently finished watching all four seasons of The Good Place, a comedy series about the afterlife, on Netflix. It is funny, and each episode is only 22 minutes long.

My favourite characters are Janet, a cheery personal assistant, and Chidi, one of the humans who is in the afterlife.  To celebrate my finishing The Good Place, I wanted to bake something. As Janet does not eat, I decided to make blueberry muffins, which have a pivotal role in a number of episodes set in Australia, where Chidi is teaching moral philosophy at the fictional St Johns University. 

Chidi’s biggest problem is his indecisiveness, to the point where he has trouble choosing a muffin from the wonderfully named coffee cart, We Crumb From A Land Down Under. 

Source - Rock The Holy Grail 

Through various events, he becomes confident enough to choose a blueberry muffin each day. However, Chidi’s confidence is subsequently thrown into disarray when he is told that blueberry pickers are subjected to cruelty, which makes blueberry muffins against Chidi’s moral code.

 In honour of Chidi, I made these blueberry muffins from the Sarabeth’s Bakery cookbook (minus the streusel topping).   I only made 3 muffins, but the full recipe makes 10.

To make them, you will need:

1 orange

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup plus 1 tbspn milk

2 eggs

2 1/4 cups plain flour

1 cup light brown sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

1 cup blueberries

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Grease 10 holes of a muffin tin with butter.

Finely zest and juice the orange. You need 1/3 cup of juice.

In a small bowl, whisk together the oil, milk, eggs, juice and zest.  In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.  Add the blueberries to the mixture and fold in gently.

Divide the batter evenly between the 10 muffin tin holes, and bake for 10 minutes. Turn down the heat to 180 degrees Celsius and continue to bake for a further 15 minutes or until the muffins are cooked through when tested with a skewer.  Remove the muffins from the oven and turn out carefully onto a wire rack to cool.

Pumpkin Pecan Pie Muffins for Queen Baking Club

A recent Queen Baking Club challenge was Pumpkin Pecan Pie Muffins.  As the name suggests, these muffins were full of mashed pumpkin goodness, with added nuts for texture, and topped with an oaty streusel topping.

You can find the recipe for these delicious muffins here.

I substituted the pecans for walnuts because I had walnuts already in the pantry.  I also used some leftover streusel from another project and added some oats to give it texture and make it more like the recipe streusel.

These were absolutely delicious muffins, and I would make them again.  Given the dire wintry weather here at present, these muffins are a perfect way to warm the soul.

WWDH - Chocolate, Banana, and Coconut Muffins

 
Glennis chose Donna's Chocolate, Banana, and Coconut Muffins for this week's Wednesday with Donna Hay.  If you are interested in making them and don't have the June/July 2015 edition of Donna Hay magazine, someone has posted the recipe online here.  For me, the recipe made 18 muffins. 

I didn't try these muffins until they were cool, and I found the flavour distinctly unexciting.  However, I read the review here which said that they tasted best straight out of the oven and not as good when cool.  I tested this theory and found that I agreed - they are very tasty warm, with big chunks of oozy chocolate and toasty coconut, but meh when they are cold.

To see what the others thought of these muffins, visit the LYL section of the WWDH website.

Lemon, Chia and Ricotta Muffins

In the June/July 2015 edition of Donna Hay magazine, there are a number of great looking muffin recipes.  I decided to make  the Lemon, Ricotta and Chia Muffins from p140.

 They are sunny looking muffins that you could eat glazed or unglazed:

However, most people tell me they like icing, so icing it is:

To make these muffins, you will need:

2 1/2 cups self rising flour
1 cup superfine sugar
2 tablespoons finely grated lemon rind
1/3 cup black chia seeds, plus extra for sprinkling
1 cup ricotta
1 cup plain Greek yoghurt
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Icing

1 cup icing sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and grease a 12 hole muffin tin.  (I actually got 18 muffins, so you may need to grease another one.)

Place the flour, sugar, lemon rind and chia seeds in a large bowl and mix to combine.

In a separate bowl mix the ricotta, eggs, vanilla, yoghurt and oil. Add the mixture to the bowl with flour and mix until just combined.

Scoop the mixture into the muffin tin, and bake the muffins for 20-25 minutes or until cooked through.

For the icing, put the sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl and whisk to combine and ice the cooled muffins.

Donna Hay's upside down pear and maple muffins

Happy Friday!

I realise that it is summer where some of you are, but in Australia, it is mid-winter, and we are promised a drop in temperatures over the weekend when an Antarctic blast comes through.

It is the perfect weather for something warm and sweet and comforting with your tea - and these upside down pear and maple muffins from Donna Hay do the trick nicely.  I found the recipe in the June-July 2015 edition of Donna Hay Magazine, but the recipe is also online at Donna's website here.

Instead of 6 Texas muffin pans, I made my muffins in 12 ordinary-sized muffin pans.  I was a bit worried that they would not come out of the tin easily, but it wasn't a problem at all - just make sure you grease them well.

These muffins are just the right degree of sweet, and the maple syrup on the pears tends to soak into the muffin layer so you don't lose that sweet goodness.

Have a great weekend.

WWDH - Too Easy Blueberry Muffins

Chaya chose Donna's Too Easy Blueberry Muffins for Wednesday with Donna Hay this week.  You can find the recipe online here.

As the title of this recipe suggests, these muffins are super easy and can be mixed up in minutes.  The most fancy equipment required is a bowl and a spoon.

When I took these to work, I didn't expect any reaction because they were just basic blueberry muffins.  However, everyone loved them: 

I have to say that these homemade muffins beat the flavour of store bought ones hands down.  As they are so easy to make, I'd never bother buying a muffin again.

To see what our other WWDH members thought of these muffins, visit the LYL section of the WWDH website.

Gluten Free Raspberry, Almond and Rosewater Muffins

The Caker featured a recipe for Gluten Free Raspberry, Almond and Rosewater Muffins on her blog.  I think they looked really pretty so I decided to print off the recipe and make them.

In the end, they turned out a little bumpy, were not really springy, and  I found the almond meal texture odd.  When I read the comment, I realised that this happened because the method leaves out the addition of the eggs, and because I was working from the method, not the ingredients, the eggs were left out.  The resulting muffins were totally edible and they were polished off at work, but without the eggs, were more like rock cakes or similar than muffins. 

I am glad that I satisfied my curiosity and made them, but I won't be revisiting these muffins.

"Carrot Cake" Muffins

After making Dorie's Scallops with Double Carrots, I was left with an awful lot of vegetable juice that I was never going to drink.  (I could not buy a small poppa size vegetable juice and ended up with a litre of it.)  Not wanting to waste the lot, I put some in a stir fry, but then wondered if I could use it creatively in some baking.

After browsing through some Google results, I found this recipe for Carrot Cake Muffins from Mom Endeavors. They use 3/4 cup of vegetable juice -perfect!  The recipe made 18 regular sized muffins.  If I had known, I might have cut the recipe down a little, but my work colleagues had no troubles polishing these off - someone told me they had three!

Here's a peek inside the finished product:

These are great muffins to get some veges into your kids, but the sugar content is on the higher side (2 cups), so if you are watching that element of your diet, you may want to cut it down a tad.  With three cups of carrot, I think these muffins are a genius way to up the vegetable content of a fussy child's diet.

Pumpkin and sultana muffins

I try to avoid wasting food as much as possible.  I have found that most vegetables on their last leg are fabulous in a stir fry, and fruit can be included in cakes and jams.

Recently, I had a forlorn piece of pumpkin in the fridge, so I made Phyllis's pumpkin muffins with it.  I have no idea who Phyllis is, but she was a member of The Toowoomba Chronicle Kids Club in 1936 - before my Mum was born!  Phyllis' recipe has been republished, and is online here.

As well as mashed pumpkin, these tasty little muffins contain sultanas.  I really enjoyed these for a change.  Here's a peek inside:

So there you go - if you have a sad piece of pumpkin past its prime in the fridge, whip up some of Phyllis's pumpkin muffins for morning tea - you won't be disappointed.

WWDH - Apple Date and Cinnamon Muffins with Maple Oats

My pick for this week's Wednesday with Donna Hay is Apple Date and Cinnamon Muffins with Maple Oats.  Donna's muffin recipes are always winners in my house, so I was happy to make another of her  great muffin recipes.

As with most muffin recipes, this one was easy peasy to make - no stand mixer required.  The hardest part was chopping the dates and peeling and grating the apples.

I didn't have quite enough maple syrup left, so I used some golden syrup to make up the balance.

The resulting muffins were delicious:

 

The Medjool dates added a lovely moist squidginess that contrasted with the coarser texture of the oats.  The grated apple also provided some welcome moisture to these muffins.

 

Verdict - I'd make them again.

 

To see what Margaret, Chaya and Sarah thought, visit their websites.

Blueberry and Yoghurt Muffins with Lemon Sugar

Everybody loves a muffin, and so it seemed when I baked Donna Hay's Blueberry and Yoghurt Muffins with Lemon Sugar, a recipe I found in Sunday Style magazine.  These muffins disappeared like hotcakes, and I can understand why, having eaten one and a half of them myself. They are tangy and lemony, with bursts of juicy blueberries in every mouthful.  The lemon sugar on top adds a pleasant crunch.

Here's a peek inside:

I would definitely make these muffins again - they are simply scrumptious.

Raspberry, Coconut and Chia Muffins

Last Saturday, I went to the Good Food and Wine Show in Melbourne with some friends.  It was a fun day out, but the trick is to get there early - after a couple of hours, the space at "Jeff's Shed" is maxed out the hundreds of people, all vying for free samples and to buy the wares on show.

At the Jalna stand, as well as a free sample of sweet and creamy yoghurt, I picked up some recipe cards for dishes using Jalna yoghurt.  I buy their low fat Greek yoghurt anyway, so I don't even have to buy it to make the recipes.

I was taken by the Raspberry, Coconut and Chia Muffins recipe.  I adore raspberries and I had all of the ingredients, so it was worth giving them a try.  You can find  the recipe online here.

I used LSA rather than almond meal because I had it, and I didn't embellish the top with pepitas or more coconut, because while the ingredients in these little babies are not bad in themselves, all the coconut and nuts and seeds makes them on the higher side for calories.

The verdict:  these were quite tasty, but given the fairly expensive ingredients (I already had them from making this and that, so no extra expense this time) and the calorie content, I probably won't make them again.  On the up side, everyone who tried them at work went to the trouble of telling me that they were yummy muffins - I bake so often that I rarely get feedback anymore, so you can take that as a tick of approval. 

WWDH - Blueberry Oat and Yoghurt Muffins

This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay pick comes from Margaret, who chose Blueberry Oat and Yoghurt Muffins.  You can find the recipe online here.

These muffins are super quick and super easy:

(Don't you love my owl flour sack tea towel from Dick's Five and Dime in Branson?)

These muffins are also super tasty:

I'd definitely make them again. 

To see what Margaret, Sarah, Chaya and Kayte thought, visit their websites.

Caramel Sticky Date Muffins

 

I am a self-confessed caramel addict.  Caramel Koalas, Caramello Chocolate, Curley Wurleys, jersey caramels, Snickers Bars, toffees and the like make me swoon.  In keeping with my love of caramel, I was stoked to find Nestle now makes caramel flavoured choc bits for baking (if you don't eat them out of the bag first).

Because I like to be different, I didn't just want to make caramel choc chip cookies, so I hunted around for an alternative recipe using caramel bits.  I was handsomely rewarded when I found this recipe for caramel sticky date muffins. 

 

 

Seriously, what's not to like?  Moreishly sweet dates, caramel bits and a lovely caramel flavour.  These went pretty fast at work, so I think I'm not the only one who liked these.

 

If you are looking for a lunchbox treat that is just a little different, these muffins could be for you. 

Lunchbox Harvest Muffins

I love the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times, and scour it regularly for new recipes.  I especially love it when they publish healthy recipes for me to try.

When I saw Melissa Clark's Lunchbox Harvest Muffins, I was in.  They contain carrot, zucchini, raisins and coconut.  Instead of whole wheat flour, I used spelt flour.

These were really good muffins - moist and tender, and as close to healthy as a muffin comes.  They are a great idea for kids' lunches, as they hide veges and will fill them up.