Lemon Orange & Cranberry Muffins

Muffins are the most simple and delicious baked goods that anyone can make! The key to making muffins is to separate the wet and dry ingredients first. Always add the dry to wet and not to overmix.

Dry ingredients:
2 cups all purpose flour (or self-raising flour)
1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

1 tablespoon of baking powder

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup of dried cranberries
pinch of salt

Wet ingredients:
2 eggs
1/4 stick of butter (room temperature)
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil (olive oil or almond oil can be substitutes)
1 tablespoon of Lemon zest
3 tablespoons of orange marmalade (i.e. orange jam)
1 tablespoon of lemon juice

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1/2 cup buttermilk (or whole milk)

Method:
1) Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl.
2) Mix the wet ingredients with a hand mixer in a second bowl.
3) Add the dry ingredients into the wet bowl by hand in a folding motion until the consistency of the batter is somewhat like thick porridge. (If the batter is too runny, add more flour to make it thicker).

4) Pour batter into muffin tray. Garnish top of muffins with a thin slice of lemon.

5) Preheat oven to 190C and bake muffins for 20mins until top is brown.

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.

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

This is the best muffin recipe I've used so far! My mom tried it and she approved! I realized the trick to making muffins is to separate dry and wet ingredients and NOT to overmix them. These muffins are not too sweet and not too heavy (I only used half a stick of butter), and they are very moist and spongy, almost banana bread-like. You could replace chocolate chip and raisins with fresh blueberries or cranberries.