Cookbook Challenge: Week 20, Tangy

Recipe: Rhubarb Yoghurt muffins
Cookbook: Vegetarian cooking, a commonsense guide

The theme for this week's Cookbook Challenge is "tangy", and first up I must make a confession. I cheated this week - I actually made these muffins last week! I was going to make a fresh recipe for the theme this week, but in keeping with our long weekend tradition we did some more house painting on Good Friday (our bedroom and our ensuite). It looks fantastic, but painting seems to suck all the energy from me for the rest of the weekend and I couldn't muster up the motivation to do anything today!

A colleague of mine gave me some rhubarb from her garden, and I used them in these muffins last weekend. I love it when people give me food - particularly when they have grown it themselves! Coincidentally, the muffins fit with the tangy theme - since they had rhubarb and yoghurt in them.



The original recipe made a large cake, but I made small cakes instead. I'm calling them muffins because the rather thick batter is mixed like a muffin rather than a cake - but the texture of them is very cake-like, similar to a butter cake. They look quite flat, but they were very good and moist. The original recipe called for a tablespoon of rose water, which I halved because I was worried that it would be too soapy. Half a tablespoon gave them a faint, sweet, fragrance that went really well with the rhubarb. I think I worried needlessly, a whole tablespoon probably would've been fine!

I gave a couple of muffins to my colleague, and she has promised me more rhubarb in the future. Sounds good to me!

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.

Update: See the round up for this week at My Food Trail.



Rhubarb and yoghurt muffins

Adapted from: Vegetarian cooking, a commonsense guide

150g finely sliced rhubarb (plus a couple of stems, thinly sliced, for decoration)
250g caster sugar
310g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs, lightly beaten
125g plain yoghurt
1 tablespoon rosewater
125g unsalted butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a 12 cup muffin tin.

In a bowl, mix together the rhubarb and sugar. Sift the flour over, and mix into the rhubarb mixture. Stir in the vanilla, egg, yoghurt, rosewater and butter until just combined (the mixture will be very thick).

Spoon the batter into the muffin trays, and decorate with the extra pieces of rhubarb. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the muffins comes out clean.

Remove from the oven and turn out on to a wire rack to cool.

Cookbook Challenge: Week 15, Muffins

Recipe: Citrus poppy seed muffins
Cookbook: Australian Women's Weekly "Bake"

The theme for the Cookbook Challenge last week was "muffins", so I turned to the trusty AWW Bake as it has a whole chapter on muffins. Despite the entire chapter, nothing really took my fancy. Perhaps there's still a lingering obsession with cupcakes, and muffins just seem unrefined and boring by comparison?

In Bake, there were a lot of recipes for savoury muffins, but I had already decided I wanted to make sweet ones. There were also quite a few recipes with berries and banana, neither of which I wanted to use. In the end, I finally decided on citrus poppy seed muffins. It was a pretty good choice because it's a really easy recipe to put together. All the ingredients get thrown into an electric mixer and voila! Muffin batter! I think it took me longer to line the muffin trays with baking paper.



As you can see in the pictures, these have quite a cakey texture, unlike most other muffins. They definitely need a good amount of citrus rind - don't skimp on the rind if you make them. It's also far too easy to over bake them. Mine tasted okay when they were warm from the oven, but the next day they seemed a bit dry. Ahh well. It was okay when washed down with a cup of tea but I'm not sure if they're good enough to warrant another try. So many muffins in the world, and so little time!

Update: See the round up at My Food Trail.



Citrus poppy seed muffins

From Australian Women's Weekly "Bake"

Makes 12 regular sized muffins (I got 8 large ones out of the batter)

125g butter softened
6 teaspoons finely grated assorted citrus rind eg lemon, lime and orange
2/3 cup (150g) caster sugar
2 eggs
2 cups (300g) self-raising flour
1/2 cup (125ml) milk
2 tablespoons poppyseeds

Preheat oven to 200°C. Grease a 12 hole muffin pan.

In an electric mixer, beat the butter, citrus rind, sugar, eggs, flour and milk until combined. Increase the speed to medium and beat until the colour of the mixture is paler. Stir in the poppyseeds and spoon the mixture into the muffin tin.

Bake for about 20 minutes or until a skewer in the middle comes out clean. Stand the muffins int he pan for 5 minutes, and then tip out on to a wire rack to cool.

Cookbook Challenge: Week 9, Berry

Recipe: Blueberry and coconut muffins
From: Australian Women's Weekly "Kitchen"

So guess what the theme is this week for the Cookbook Challenge? Berry. And guess who did berry pancakes LAST week? Yep, genius over here!

Obviously I don't plan my weekly recipes in advance. If I had been clever, I would've done the pancakes this week and found a different recipe for the sweet week. But I didn't, so I spent a bit of time this weekend looking for another berry recipe. I figured that I was going to bake something, since I didn't fancy my chances of finding a savoury recipe that also incorporated berries.

And muffins it was! These muffins were pretty easy to put together, although the batter was extremely thick. Taste wise, they're not a light, fluffy cake-like muffin - the coconut gives them a chewy, heavy texture that is vaguely similar to a scone. I'm not really selling them, I know, but let me tell you that they are strangely moreish. I ate one, and another, and another.... I hate to tell you how many I ate today (FOUR, for goodness sake).

I think that means they're good.

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here.

Update: see what everyone else made at My Food Trail.



Blueberry and coconut muffins

Adapted from The Australian Women's Weekly Kitchen

Makes 12

1 & 1/2 cups self raising flour
1 cup wholemeal flour
90g cold butter, chopped
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 & 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/3 cup (desiccated coconut)
150g fresh blueberries

Preheat the oven to 200°C and grease or line a 12 hole muffin tin.

In a food processor, pulse the chopped butter and caster sugar until it resembles large breadcrumbs.

Sift the flours into a large bowl (add in any stuff from the wholemeal flour that couldn't make it through the sieve), and add the butter mixture. Add the buttermilk, egg, desiccated coconut and blueberries. Mix until just combined.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin tin holes and bake for about 20 minutes, or until a skewer in the centre comes out come. Stand the muffins in the tin for five minutes, and then remove on to a wire rack to cool.

Chocolate and pear muffins with chocolate syrup

Hooray for long weekends! I spent the bulk of it cooking - it was nice to get back in the kitchen and be enthused and excited again.

On Saturday we went to visit my dear friend Emily, her partner Mark and their lovely wee girl Audrey. Em and Mark bought their first house recently and moved in about 6 weeks ago. I was keen to see their new place, but as Em is rather pregnant at the moment (she's due next week!) I offered to cook them dinner in exchange for a nosey beak and a play with Audrey. Win win situation!

What to cook, what to cook? I've never been of the mindset that, when cooking for friends, you should only use recipes that you have made before. If you can't experiment on your friends, what's the point? (That, and I have enough faith in my cooking skills now that I reckon I could salvage a dish even if the recipe was crap.) I spent a fair bit of time browsing my cookbooks and the internet and settled on a chicken and date stew from taste.com.au. (I did take a photo, but it didn't look terribly appetising so I won't bother posting it.)

The dish turned out great - it had lots of flavour from all the spices and the dates added a final bit of sweetness. I've said before that I'm not sure about fruit in savoury dishes, but perhaps I'm warming to it. I served it with cous cous that had sultanas and pepitas stirred in. It was nice to have the bits of crunchy pepita and almonds as a textural difference.



And dessert, of course I made dessert! Dessert was
chocolate and pear muffins with chocolate syrup (recipe also from taste.com.au). They look like it took a fair amount of effort to make, but they were actually quite simple to put together. Though I did almost forget to add the eggs... I might have a different opinion if I hadn't reread the recipe just in time! The muffins were quite dense and rich, with the pear in the middle helping to break up the chocolate. They look gorgeous and are worth making, I reckon.

Links:
Chicken and date tagine/stew
Chocolate and pear muffins with chocolate syrup

French onion muffins (and pumpkin soup)

Cold weather always makes me crave soup. I have a couple of soups on rotation during the cold months and one of those is an easy, peasy pumpkin soup.

It basically involves softening some diced onion and garlic in a bit of oil. Then I add peeled and diced pumpkin to the pot, add just enough water to cover the pumpkin, plus a couple of teaspoons of vegetable stock powder. This gets simmered until the pumpkin is soft. Then I mush everything up with a stick blender, season with salt and pepper and add a teaspoon of curry powder (just enough to give it a slight flavour - not too much). We normally eat the soup with a bit of sour cream on top.

The hardest thing about making this soup is peeling the skin off the pumpkin. It's such a tedious job but made easier with a sharp knife.

To go with the soup, I usually make French onion muffins. The recipe that I use comes from a little muffin book that I bought from a discount shop a few years ago (back when it wasn't as easy to find recipes online). The book cost me $1! Onion muffins are the only muffins I've ever made from the book, but it's still been $1 well spent!



French Onion Muffins

From Marvellous Muffins by Robyn Martin

Makes 10

2 medium onions
2 tablespoons oil
50g butter
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup grated gruyere cheese

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Peel onions and cut into thin rings. Heat oil in a frying pan and fry onions over medium heat until golden. Add butter to pan and melt. Remove from heat and set aside.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Make a well in the centre of dry ingredients. Lightly beat eggs and milk. Add onion and egg mixtures to dry ingredients. Add the grated cheese, reserving some for sprinkling on top of the muffins. Mix quickly until just combined.

Three quarters fill greased muffin pans with mixture. Sprinkle over the rest of the cheese and bake for 15 minutes or until cooked. Eat warm.

Little orange poppyseed cakes

I had a free health check at work today. There was good news and bad news. The bad news is that my height was 3cm less than I thought it was. Some might think that's not really bad news, but when you're not very tall, every centimetre counts!

The good news is that, along with my glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol being normal, I was also a couple of kilos lighter than I thought I would be. I've been eating a lot of cake recently, so this was a surprise.

I actually think that I may have been under measured and under weighed, but I can't decide which outcome I'd prefer – to be taller but heavier, or shorter but lighter. Hmmmm.



The other week I felt like cake. Did I mention I've been eating a lot of cake recently? I went and bought a slice of poppyseed cake and felt very under whelmed as it seemed to have a nasty, chemically sweetness. It inspired me to do better! A google search unearthed a diabetic recipe for orange poppy seed cake (or so the website said). I made a few adaptations to the recipe, and rather than a big cake I baked several little ones.

My little cakes were strangely compelling. They weren't too sweet, nor too orangey, and the texture wasn't particularly cakey. In fact, they reminded me of scones. And they were SO moreish – I found myself eating a couple at a time because one wasn't enough!




Little orange poppy seed cakes

Makes 12 regular sized muffins

Adapted from Fitness and Freebies

½ cup sugar
6 tablespoons butter, softened
3 eggs
¾ cup unsweetened yoghurt
Zest from one orange
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice
2 cups cake flour
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 180° C.

In a large bowl, beat sugar and margarine until smooth and fluffy. Beat in eggs, yoghurt, orange juice and orange zest until smooth.

Mix in the cake flour, poppy seeds, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Mix until just combined.

Grease a 12 cup muffin tin. Pour batter into the moulds and bake for about 15 minutes, or until skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

Old-fashioned maple bran muffins

I've been on the look out for baking recipes that aren't too sweet to eat at morning tea. The recipe for these maple bran muffins appealed because the recipe doesn't contain sugar (but it does have 4 tablespoons of maple syrup). The original recipe asked for pecans, and instead I substituted with dried apricots. I thought that the dried apricots worked well, as they gave a bit of fruity sweetness to the nuttiness of the bran. I tried another batch using banana – and this was a big FAIL. I know that I liked the recipe because I didn't want something that was too sweet, but the banana batch just wasn't sweet enough. They were just too damn healthy tasting!



Old-fashioned maple bran muffins

Adapted from Linda Collister's Quick Breads

Makes 12 medium muffins

225g sour cream
125ml milk
75g wheat bran
35g wheat germ
1 large egg, beaten
4 tablespoons maple syrup
125g plain white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
a pinch of salt
100g dried apricots, chopped into small pieces (or 100g chopped pecans)
a little demerara or coarse sugar for sprinkling

In a large bowl combine the sour cream with the milk, then stir in the wheat bran and wheat germ and leave to soak for 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 180°C.

Stir in the egg and maple syrup into the sour cream mixture. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt on to the mixture and mix in. Stir in the apricots

Spoon the mixture into muffin moulds. Sprinkle each muffin with a little sugar and then bake for about 25 minutes until firm to the touch.

Turn out on to a wire cooling rack. Eat the same day while still warm, or the next day gently reheated. Can be frozen for up to a month.

Carrot cake muffins

I like the humble carrot. I wouldn't say that it's my favourite vegetable, but it's certainly one of the most useful. I put it in almost everything – pasta sauces, soups, stews, stir fry, sandwiches, roasts and salads as well as eating it raw by itself or with dips.

Carrot juice is probably my favourite juice, although I don't drink it often due to the amount of carrots needed to make a cup (plus I don't have a juicer). And carrot cake? Carrot cake has got to be one of the best cakes ever. Foodtimeline says that carrot cake was most likely descended from Medieval carrot puddings, where they were used due to the natural sweetness (because sweetners were expensive). Carrot cake was around here and there since that time, and recipes for cakes with a cream cheese icing started to appear in the 1960s.

This recipe was adapted from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. The original recipe called for plain white flour and walnuts. I used wholemeal flour instead, because one of my favourite things about carrot cake is the nuttiness. Because I don't like walnuts and therefore never have any in the pantry, I substituted pepitas.

I made muffins instead of a big cake and ate them over a few days - they were a great mid-morning snack.



Simple carrot cake

Adapted from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion

125 g self-raising wholemeal flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2/3 cup olive oil
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups finely grated carrot
60 g roughly chopped walnuts or pepitas

Preheat oven to 180 degree C and grese an 18 cm springform tin or 6 cup muffin tin. Mix flour, sugar and spices. Add oil and eggs and beat in a food processor or an electric mixer for 1 minute. Stir in carrot and walnuts/pepitas. Spoon into prepared tin and bake for about 1 hour (less if making muffins). Cool in tin before turning out.

When cold, dust with icing sugar mixed with ground cinnamon or ice with cream cheese mixed with a touch of icing sugar and lemon juice.

Mini cheesecakes

I made these little cheesecakes for a gathering at a friend's place. They taste quite light, despite the ingredients, and they're not too sweet and rich. The fruit on the top helps give a bit of tartness. They were very popular! I don't think they would have been as impressed if they had known how easy they were to make.

The recipe came from a book that I bought at a book fair for $2. It's a recipe book put out by Kraft with recipes for cooking with Philadelphia cream cheese. This is the only recipe I've made from it so far, probably because we rarely have cream cheese in the fridge. Now that I've had another look through it, there seems to be some interesting savoury recipes. I might have to stock up on cream cheese more often and try some out.



Mini cheesecakes

Adapted from Heavenly Moments: cooking with Philadelphia Cream Cheese

Makes 24 mini cakes, or 12 larger ones

2 x 250 g block of cream cheese, softened
1 cup (225g) caster sugar
2 eggs
150g almondmeal
1/2 cup (125ml) sour cream
2 tablespoons custard powder
Fresh fruit (I used strawberries and blueberries)
2 tablespoons maple syrup

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
Line the bases of a muffin pan.
Beat the cream cheese and sugar in a medium bowl until just combined. Add the eggs, ground almonds, sour cream and custard powder, beating until smooth. Spoon in the the prepared pan. Top the mixture with fruit and drizzle with maple syrup.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until set and golden (if you're making small cakes, it may take less time).

Coconut and raspberry muffins

I had an urge to bake last week, and ended up with these muffins after a lot of flipping through cookbooks and browsing the internets. They could be the best muffins EVER. Sweet, moist, nutty, fragrant with coconut and with the occasional tangy raspberry - they were such a treat. Chocolate is so overrated - give me these any day!



Coconut and raspberry muffins

Adapted from Super Food Ideas – August 2006

Ingredients (makes 12 muffins)

1 3/4 cups desiccated coconut
1 1/2 cups coconut cream
1 cup caster sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 2/3 cups self-raising wholemeal flour
1 cup frozen raspberries, putting 12 aside for decoration
Shredded coconut

Method

1. Combine coconut and coconut cream in a large bowl. Cover and stand for 30 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease a 12 cup muffin tin or line with muffin cases.
3. Using a metal spoon, stir sugar, egg and vanilla into coconut mixture. Gently stir in the flour until combined. Fold in raspberries.
4. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin tins and put a raspberry on top of each one. Top with shredded coconut if desired. Bake for 20-30 mins or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool muffins in pan for 10 minutes. Lift onto a wire rack to cool completely.