The other night being a little bit bored - I didn't feel like reading, there wasn't anything good on TV, I didn't feel like washing the dishes...you get the idea. I was feeling a little unsettled and nothing, to me, is more grounding then baking. The whole process: finding the recipe, taking out the ingredients, making your adjustments, measuring, mixing, pouring, watching science at work in the oven, smelling, tasting!
I decided to search for something to make and I got it into my head that I needed to make a citrus cake of some sort. I love citrus of all kinds: oranges, lemons, grapefruit, limes, oh my, limes! Citrus season is in full swing right about now and you can get a lovely array of all kinds of citrus fruits. Now I'm not a big lover of cakes, I just never have been; too sweet, too heavy, too something that I can't quite put my finger on. Muffins, on the other hand, I love! Somehow they're not as pretentious: I feel like cake, and cupcakes in particular, are the snobbish and snooty cousin of the humble muffin.
This is quite surprising because I'm known for baking cupcakes, baking lovely, wonderfully looking cupcakes in fact (and I must add wonderfully tasting ones too.) I find cupcakes lend themselves well to baking as well as artistic creativity, I like decorating them, I'm not a big fan of eating though: there's science and there's art involved in baking and with cupcakes you can display both. And of course people ooh and ahh and flutter over a beautiful cupcake.
But muffins, muffins are for me. Muffins as I mentioned are the humble cousin; usually looked upon lowly and religated to breakfast bread basket, not the delightful dessert at the end of the meal. Not as sweet, not always as pretty looking, but when you get right down to it they're the meat and bones of baking. They can be made grandiose, popping out with all sorts of exotic ingredients or they can simply be a good nourishing full-of fruit-and-fibre snack.
I was looking for something in between.
And now back to the Mediterranean thing: I wanted a muffin that used olive oil, specifically an orange olive oil that I just bought from the Italian Center. I had selected it for my class on salads in which I did a game, having participants guess the different types of oils and I knew this orange olive oil would be perfect in a baked good, cakes yes, but I think a muffin would be just as lovely, or even more so. A muffin would be able to showcase the orange, the subtle notes in the olive oil and wouldn't be overpowered with the sweetness and icing, the over-stuffing, in my opinion, of a cupcake.
I found a number of lovely muffin recipes with olive oil, many of them different variations of Giada de Laurentis recipe (her recipe from the Food Network is here.) The proportions of flour to oil didn't quite feel right to me - I thought they'd feel like too cake-like to the taste. I then came across this recipe on my Facebook newsfeed and liked the ingredients and amounts. I looked through my pantry, tinkered with the recipe; pretty well turning it upside down and came up with this beauty. The texture and crumb of my kind of cake, but the demureness of a muffin - not too sweet, with subtle, not overpowering flavours - just what I was looking for!
Now I had some lemons and even a lime - those would have made lovely muffins - but I chose the last blood orange I had left from my shopping trip last week. Blood oranges are beautiful the sweetness of an orange and the deep colour of a Rio star grapefruit. Just look at it!
And look at the juice from it; blood red indeed.
Thank you to Heather's French Press for her Meyer Lemon Muffins, the inspiration for my recipe here. And isn't that how all great recipes are formed, they're handed down from one master to the next each adding their own little bit, pinch of this, take out that and it becomes their own new version.
Here's my recipe for orange, olive oil and pignoli (pine nut) muffins - did you catch my little hint when "I said pine for these muffins" in the sneak peek that I gave you on the Facebook page? I'm a writer I like playing with words: puns, alliteration, onomatopoeia, all of that sort of thing...
Orange, Olive
Oil and Pignoli Muffins
1 ¼ cups cake and pastry flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup sugar, white or raw (add 1-2 tablespoons more if you
like a sweeter muffin)
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon salt
1 blood orange – zest from the whole orange and
Juice from ½ of the blood orange (a regular orange would be fine here as well, but if you can find a blood red please try it!)
1 egg, slightly beaten
250 ml of milk (any kind – I used half dairy and
half rice milk)
50 ml of orange flavoured olive oil (or any
other citrus flavour, or other light olive oil)
Pignoli (pine nuts) for decorating the top
(optional)
Raw sugar for sprinkling on top (optional)
- Preheat oven to 375°F. Lightly grease muffin pan or use silicone or paper liners (silicone recommended for cleanest removal.)
- With a whisk, combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
- Add in orange zest, the juice, egg, milk and olive oil.
- Stir until the dry ingredients are mixed in – do not over-mix, muffin batter should be lumpy.
- Divide into muffin tins; fill only about 2/3 full.
- Sprinkle with the pine nuts and the raw sugar, as desired.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the muffins are golden brown and the pine nuts are nicely toasted.
- Cool in pan for 5 minutes; then remove to wire rack to cool completely.
These are lovely for breakfast with a smear of marmalade or as a snack
with tea just as is!
Yield 12 large muffins (I managed to eek out 14 slightly smaller ones; you can save the extra 2 for yourself, no one has to know about those!)
Who's humble and lowly now? Look at this beaut!
Now that's done, I'm going back to finishing my tea and muffin. Happy Baking! Ith gu leòir!
Copyright Kooks in the Kitchen 2015. All rights reserved.