Cranberry Almond Muffins

First things first! Take a look around… we got a new look to start the New Year! A few days early but, I couldn’t resist :). A little bit embarrassing to be a web designer using the default WordPress template for so long! It’s still not an original WP theme. I used Woo Themes Canvas theme, which is basically a blank design slate with all the cool nuts and bolts functionality built in. All I had to do was make it pretty, which sped up the process a LOT.

Still needs a few tweaks but nothing serious. I hope you like it. It feels cleaner and easier to read to me and definitely has more of my personality added in.  Yes, I am a doodler in real life – not a very good one, but a doodler none the less.  Hehe… used to drive my old boss crazy until he understood that doodling in meetings is my way of focusing my brain (and ears).  So I’ve been learning how to turn my doodles into  vector images the last few days.

Can you all stand some more cranberries? Good! (Even if you can’t, you don’t really get a say in the matter, hehe). Needed to get rid of the leftover cranberry sauce in the fridge and a few other odds & ends..

It had the potential to be a disaster, because I am the world’s lousiest muffin maker.  That’s right.  The lousiest.  I never get the wet/dry ratio right whenever I go out on my own.  I never measure things exactly enough.  I stir too much or not enough.  It brings back nightmares from 8th grade Home Ec classes where I always got in trouble for not leveling off my dry measures with a spatula  Seriously people… it’s Home Ecomnomics… not brain surgery!  Unless… of course… you’re talking about muffins.

But, despite the experimentation, these turned out really well!  (I’m eating my second one right now!) So without further ado, the recipe!

Cranberry Almond Muffins

* based on a recipe from Country Living Country Mornings Cookbook (my changes are in brackets)

1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour (I used multi-grain)
3/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 cup fresh cranberries, each one cut in half (I used leftover frozen ones, whole.  If you cut ’em up, they can’t pop in your mouth in the muffin and who wants to cut a cup of cranberries in half??  frozen worked fine… didn’t thaw them out)
1/2 cup sliced natural almonds (used chopped.  Didn’t have any sliced)
1/3 cup butter or margarine
1 cup milk (I filled a measuring cup up with my leftover cranberry sauce which was about 1/4 cup and then filled the rest of the way with skim milk)
1 large egg

I also added the zest and juice of one leftover wedge of lemon I had.  Crowning touch I think.

This recipe makes a dozen normal sized muffins or 6 jumbos.  You can make the jumbos in custard cups if you want!

In a large bowl, with a fork, combine flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg.

Add cranberries and almonds and lemon zest and toss till coated and mixed in.

In a small saucepan, melt butter.  Allow to cool a little and stir in milk/cranberry sauce mixture and then beat in egg and add lemon juice.

Stir the liquid into the the dry mixture and stir until just moistened – batter will be lumpy.

Put batter into greased muffin pan or custard cups.

Bake jumbos 30-35 minutes at 375F and regulars for 20 minutes at 400F.  Test with a toothpick – it should come out clean.

Let muffins stand 5 minutes before removing them from the pans and serve warm.

Photography

Pretty simple shot actually.  Put them in a basket on the table and fired a few rounds. No tripod, no background fussing but great light this morning.

50mm, f2.0, 1/4ooth, ISO200, +1 exposure compensation.