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.

Daring Bakers - Zucchini Coconut and Macadamia Muffins - Hidden Veges

Ruth from Makey-Cakey was our March 2013 Daring Bakers’ challenge host. She encouraged us all to get experimental in the kitchen and sneak some hidden veggies into our baking, with surprising and delicious results! 

The challenge required us to bake a sweet cake, biscuit or confectionery of our choice with a “hidden” vegetable ingredient. I chose Karen Martini's zucchini, coconut and macadamia muffins from The Age Good Food (p9) on 5 March 2013.  You can find the recipe online here.  I skipped the xanthan gum and the frosting:

These muffins were soft, not overly sweet but still pleasant, and the macadamias gave a nice crunch.  You can see the zucchini in mine, but if you wanted to shred the zucchini really finely, I am sure that it would "disappear".

Thanks to this month's host, Ruth.  To see what the other Daring Bakers made, visit the slideshow at the Daring Kitchen website.

Perfect Blueberry Muffins (Felicity Cloake)

I am an avid reader of Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" recipes in The Guardian.  A short time ago, Felicity featured a recipe for Perfect Blueberry Muffins - a great baking recipe to try during the busy working week as it is not labour or time intensive.

There were two things in particular in this recipe that made it different from other blueberry muffins that I have made.  First, Felicity uses brown sugar instead of white sugar - I think this gave the muffins a wonderful depth of caramelised flavour.  Second, instead of just using all the blueberries whole, she mashes half and uses the remainder whole.  I believe that the mashed blueberries made the muffins wonderfully moist.

My Pilates class did vote these muffins as perfect - so perhaps Felicity is spot on.  Enjoy!

BWJ - Buttermilk Crumb Muffins

It's Melbourne Cup Day here in Melbourne, so Melburnians have a public holiday for a horse race.  Pretty cool, yeah?  I am not going to the races this year, but it is obligatory to watch the Cup on the telly - the big race is at 3pm EST.  Apart from The Cup itself, the fun of the races is watching everyone all dressed up - the best time to do this is first thing in the morning, before everything falls into tatters, like Cinderella after the ball.

This Tuesday is also a Baking with Julia Tuesday, and this week's recipe was Buttermilk Crumb Muffins, hosted by Alisa of Easier Than Pie.  As I am not at work today to share, I only made a quarter recipe of these muffins, yielding just four.  I don't use shortening in general, so I substituted the same quantity of butter, and didn't seem to have any issues.

These muffins were easy to make, and delicious while warm - making them perfect in my book.

You can check what the other BWJ bakers thought of these muffins at the website. 

Zucchini and Apricot Muffins

It's nearly the end of the working week - hooray!  Weekend here we come.  To say that work has been hectic is an understatement, but them's the breaks - the work ebbs and flows, and you have to either ride the tide or sink.

Last week, I made some zucchini and apricot muffins from this recipe in The New York Times:

The recipe comes from the "Recipes for Health" section, so as you might imagine, they are not particularly sweet (due to a dearth of sugar),  and there is definitely no frosting (although a cream cheese frosting or a lemon glaze would work rather well, I think).  Here's a peek inside a muffin:

I was worried that these muffins would not be well received at work, but funnily enough, they disappeared fairly rapidly.  I won't say that I loved them, although there were OK - my tip is that they are better the next day after they have softened a little and the flavours have developed.  One lady told me she liked these for the very fact that they weren't overly sweet - which made me very happy.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Blueberry Corn Muffins

Last Friday, I had to deliver the Legal component of the Sales team training.  At dinner the night before, I learned that the products and marketing team had handed out chocolates in their session.  Accordingly, I had a lot to live up to.  To uphold the honour of the Legal team, I decided to make muffins to hand out, primarily because they are quick and easy.
I flicked through Leila Lindholm's A Piece of Cake, and my eye was caught by a recipe for Blueberry Corn Muffins.  They sounded tasty, I had all the ingredients and they were easy to make - I was sold.

These muffins did not disappoint:

The soft, sweet berries contrasted with the slight grittiness of the corn.

To make 12 of these muffins (I got 14), you will need:

100g butter

2 eggs
150ml buttermilk
180g plain flour
150g polenta or cornmeal

150g sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon plain flour
150g fresh or frozen blueberries

Preheat your oven to 220 degrees Celsius and line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin papers.  Melt the butter, then add it to a bowl with the eggs and buttermilk, and beat well with a fork or whisk.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold together until well combined. 

Shake the blueberries and plain flour together in a plastic bag to coat the berries, then fold through the  muffin mixture.  Scoop the muffin batter into the papers, filling them approximately 2/3 full.  Place the muffins into the preheated oven and bake for 20 minutes or until cooked through.  Unmould the muffins onto a wire rack immediately on removing them from the oven. 

Serve warm or cold.

Cannellini Bean Casserole and Apple and Berry Muffins for Vegan Potluck

I had a lovely day today attending a vegan potluck hosted by Johanna of Green Gourmet Giraffe. Johanna and I started blogging at around the same time, and have been exchanging comments for a while, so it was lovely to meet her and her family (including the famous Dolly, for regular readers of Johanna's blog).  It was also great to meet some other Melbourne bloggers - namely Cindy and Mike of Where's the Beef?, Mel of Veganise This!,  and Alex of Soya & Chocolat and her boyfriend Steven, all of whom are vegan.

I am slightly thick in that when Johanna said the theme was green and vegan, I read "green" as being "environmentally friendly" (because eating meat is very resource intensive), when in fact it meant the colour green - as Johanna's favourite colour is green and it is in the name of her blog.  To quote Homer Simpson - D'oh!  Everyone else understood this, and Cindy and Mike dressed in green (Mike's green T-shirt even had a giraffe on it!).  Here is the impressive array of green dishes (sans Mike's green couscous, which came later):

and some beautiful green desserts - pick the non-green one:

Oh well, I got the vegan part right, and made a cannellini bean casserole (pictured at the top of this post)  and apple and berry muffins (pictured below).  I enjoyed both dishes, but would probably only make the stew again. I think there are better options for vegan muffins than the recipe I chose while operating on autopilot the other night, not realising that they contained almost a full bottle of maple syrup:

For the casserole,  I substituted the lima beans in the original recipe for cannellini beans, as my supermarket's range did not appear to stretch to lima beans.  Subsequent research shows that I should have chosen canned butter beans for the closest match, but I thought the cannellini beans were good.  I also gave the stew a little kick by adding a chopped fresh chilli - I think that was just right, as it may have been too bland without it. I also chose to leave out the dill, but added dried tarragon.

The cannellini bean casserole was based on a lima bean casserole recipe on p193 of Gourmet Vegetarian by Jane Price.  My version of this casserole is as follows:

2 x 400g cans cannellini beans, drained and washed
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 stick of celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped 
1 fresh chilli, chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
1 x 400g tin crushed tomatoes
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon dried tarragon
Salt and pepper

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Heat the oil in a large casserole dish on the stovetop.   Add all of the chopped vegetables and cook them until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste and water.  Bring to the boil, then simmer for 3 minutes.  Add the beans and tarragon, and season with salt and pepper to taste.  Bring the casserole back to the boil, then remove it from the stovetop, cover it with a lid or alfoil, and place into the preheated oven to cook for 50 minutes or until the sauce is thickened.  (I actually found this was a little too long, so most of my sauce had disappeared.) Serve the casserole hot.

The apple and berry muffin recipe is from p166 of Rowie Dillon's Indulge (gluten free  recipes).  These muffins are a little on the exxy side to make because of the maple syrup, and only taste OK.  However, they have the advantage of being gluten free, as they are based on buckwheat flour.  I was attracted to this recipe because it contains grated apple, dates and berries - yum!  The muffins are also fairly easy and quick to make (a bonus!).  To make these muffins you will need:

1 tablespoon gluten-free cornflour
3 1/2 cups buckwheat flour
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
2 grated apples
1 cup chopped dates
235ml maple syrup
1 cup water
300g fresh or frozen berries (I used half this amount of  frozen raspberries)

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin papers.

In a large bowl, combine the cornflour, buckwheat flour and bicarbonate of soda.  Next, mix in the grated apple, dates and maple syrup.  Add the water and fold into the mixture.  Finally, fold in the berries.  Divide the mixture between the muffin holes (I actually got 15 muffins, not 12), and bake the muffins for 30 minutes in the preheated oven.  Remove the muffins from the oven and cool in the tin for 5 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Raspberry yoghurt muffins

This week, I have the baking bug, so I am on a mission to bake things from ingredients that I already have.  Living in my refrigerator, I had a big pot of natural yoghurt nearing its expiry date, so the natural choice was to make a yoghurt cake.

After a quick flick through my cookbooks, I found a recipe for Berry and yoghurt muffins on p378 of the Australian Womens Weekly Bake cookbook.   Bingo!  I had a box of frozen raspberries for the berry component, and together with the fact that it was a quick and easy  recipe to make, I knew I had found what I wanted.

These muffins were rather tasty - because they contain rolled oats, they some texture , and the raspberries added some tang.

To make these raspberry yoghurt muffins, you will need:

1 1/2 cups (225g) self raising flour
1/3 cup (30g) rolled oats
3 eggs
3/4 cup (165g) firmly packed brown sugar
3/4 cup (200g) plain yoghurt
1/3 cup (80ml) vegetable oil
180g fresh or  frozen berries

 Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin cases.

Sift the flour into a bowl, then add the oats, eggs, sugar, yoghurt and oil, and stir to combine.  Fold the berries in gently.

Spoon the batter into the muffin cases (I like to use an icecream scoop), then bake the muffins for approximately 25 minutes.  Remove the muffins from the oven and allow them to stand for 5 minutes in the pan before unmoulding onto a wire rack to cool completely. 

Enjoy!