Sweet Potato and Ginger Muffins

After making banana chocolate muffins recently, I wanted to try different ingredients for muffins, and not the typical chocolate chip or blueberry. I always like to use what I have at home, rather than going out to the grocery store and add things in my kitchen that will only be used once. So, this time I found some Japanese sweet potatos (mom just bought them from Sogo) which she originally wanted to make Sweet Potato with Ginger Soup 蕃薯糖水. Apparently this is Mr. Li Ka Shing's favourite chinese dessert every night! (If you really want to know :P)

I actually found a lot of muffin recipes with sweet potatos and I picked one that was healthy (no butter in the recipe), easy to make and used the same baking concept as my other muffin recipes. I thought sweet potato may be too starchy for muffins, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by the result! I added a bit of nut and oat cereal to add a crunchy texture, but I think chopped almonds or pecans will be better (unfortunately I didn't have any at home). For ginger, I used crystallized ginger extracted from a sweet ginger tea in sugar syrup (see pictures) that you can normally find in a chinese grocery store. I don't think raw ginger would work in this recipe.

My mom (my QC) gave me the thumbs-up for these muffins! They have a very similar taste to a baked sweet potato, soft, not too sweet, and the ginger is a good compliment that is refreshing to the palette.