Orange and Cinnamon Muffins
January 5, 2007 at 2:40 PM
by Ashleigh
Orange & Cinnamon Muffins with Gratuitous Shot of Oxo Good Grips OvenmittIt's not my birthday until next week but we've been celebrating early because my order from Lakeland arrived. Oh, and what an order it was! A microplane grater, an apple corer, an apple segmenter, a microplane nutmeg grater and an oxo good grips silicon ovenglove, and of course there had to be a book too - The Big Book of the Best Kept Secrets of the Women's Institute.
The book is gorgeous. It's laid out seasonally, so you can either use the index for what you're searching for, or look at the seasonal recipes. I love that it tells you which recipes are recommended for freezing. For me freezing stuff, especially cakes and cookies, means baking won't interfere with my weight loss plan. This is all a very important part of my New Year's resolution about having more fun (and not putting on more kilos!)
What better way to celebrate than by breaking out the microplane grater to use for some orange and cinnamon muffins from my new book. The microplane grater has me awestruck at it's speed and efficiency. All other graters in our home are going in a pile for Queen's Day!
I even saved my hands from the usual oven burns by using my new ovenglove.
Here's the recipe:
Orange and Cinnamon Muffins (adapted from the Big Book of the Best Kept Secrets of the WI)
Makes 9 medium muffins
175g plain flour (I used bread flour)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
50g caster sugar (ordinary granulated sugar here)
grated zest of 1 orange (grated with my new grater - wheeee!)
1 egg
125 ml milk
50g melted butter (I used liquid margarine)
- Preheat oven to 190C. Line muffin cups with paper liners.
- Sift the flour, cinnamon and baking powder together into a large bowl. I stand my bowl on the scale, rest the sieve on top, reset to 0, then measure my ingredients directly into the sieve. Less mess that way. After sifting the flour, remove the sieve, reset to 0 again and add the sugar.
- Mix the milk, egg and melted butter together with a fork and add to the dry ingredients with the orange zest.
- Stir with a wooden spoon until just mixed. Really, until just mixed. I could still see some floury bits on my mixture.
- Divide between the paper cases. I used an ice cream scoop.
- Bake for 10 - 15 minutes. When the muffins are risen and feel springy they're cooked. I had mine in the oven almost the full 15 minutes.
I couldn't let mine be just naked, healthy muffins, so I made a glaze with some icing sugar and the juice of half an orange and drizzled it over the warm muffins with a fork. My, they were tasty. Lovely combination of flavours.
Bon appetit!
Comments
Thanks for the muffin recipe Ash. I made a batch this afternoon and they are gorgeous even though I forgot to put the sugar in!! The glaze on the top made up for that and has a lovely flavour.
Those muffins look really tempting-great to hear such a good review for the WI cook book. now,
January 6, 2007 5:25 PM