Happy December!
I am SO excited for holiday season, and am currently trying to balance my cravings for holiday baking projects with my attempts at a vague "between holiday" detox in which I chug ginger lemon tea, start to put running back in my life, and eat lots of produce. We'll see how it goes....
I had lots of fresh cranberries left over from my epic Thanksgiving apple-cranberry pie and decided to make muffins, a kind of healthier spinoff of the Jiffy cranberry bread mixes I grew up on. The muffins turned out even better than I had hoped for, and they look so cute and festive studded with the bright red cranberries. The sugar topping is essential to balance out the tartness and add that bakery-style sparkle! I'm kind of obsessed with these.
Sparkly Cranberry Muffins
adapted from Joy of Cooking
Yields 10-12 muffins
Dry ingredients:
- 2 cups white whole wheat flour
- 1 Tablespoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup plain or vanilla yogurt
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 cup sugar (can use up to 2/3 cup)
- 1/2 cup fresh cranberries
- zest from one orange
- 1 to 2 Tablespoons"big" sugar for topping (i.e. sanding sugar or turbinado. I used Sugar in the Raw brand.)
Preheat oven to 400*F. Combine dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Whisk together wet ingredients in a large bowl. Dump the dry ingredients into the large bowl and gently mix until JUST combined (with muffins it's ok to still have dry clumps and streaks in the batter). Spoon into a greased or paper-cup lined muffin tin. Fill tins to the brim for big muffins (will make ~10) or 3/4 full for regular sized muffins (go big or go home). Sprinkle the tops of muffins with sanding sugar and bake for 20 minutes, or until tops of muffins are lightly browned.
You could probably bake this in a bread tin as well, but the baking time would double.