Christmas Muffins - Cranberries & Orange

If I were to design a muffin called Christmas, this will be it...because Cranberries = Christmas! Am submitting this entry to Aspiring Bakers #2: Christmas! (Dec 2010).

This muffin recipe is really easy, made in the festive spirit of healthy living. When I attended the cooking demo by Chef Anna Olson and she said you can basically substitute up to half of flour of whatever recipes we have with whole wheat flour without drastically affecting the texture and taste of the baked goods. That explains why we often see 1 cup flour : 1 cup whole wheat flour in supposedly health conscious recipes.

Muffins are great! In the spirit of being health conscious (since this is a whole wheat muffin), I use low fat milk instead of full cream. Despite that, the muffin remains moist and tender. The orange gives the muffin a refreshing zesty twist accompanied by tarty cranberries' tanginess, it's like eating Marks and Spencer's Cranberry Orange cookie but in a muffin form. This is a fairy tale of tart meeting sweetness, with a satisfying burping happily ever after.

Cranberry Orange Muffins

(makes 12 muffins)

Ingredients:
1 egg
70ml vegetable oil
240ml milk
200g sugar
1 orange's zest
1 tsp of Grand Marnier
140g all purpose flour
150g whole wheat flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
70g dried cranberries (I used 35g, that's all that I'm left with :P)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Line 12 muffin paper cups on the muffin tray.
2. Whisk together egg, oil, milk, sugar and orange zest
3. In a separate bowl, sift flours, baking powder, salt and stir in egg mixture
4. Fold in cranberries and scoop batter into muffin
5. Bake for 30mins and transfer to wire rack to cool

Cranberry Yogurt Chiffon Cake

Pardon my recent chiffon craze, baking it is pretty addictive haha! Have a tub of yogurt threatening to expire, so had to make good use of it. This recipe carries more egg whites and almost twice the amount of cake flour than my usual one, so hesitated making it initially. But I guess baking is about trial and errors...

As it has much flour, the cake is denser. Though moist enough because of the yogurt, I still prefer my chiffon cake less than airy. I'm not sure how that big air pocket came about and my cranberries all sank to the bottom of the pan. Think I'll just sprinkle them on top of the batter the next time, hopefully the latter has enough time to cook so that the cranberries can scatter more evenly in the batter. The lemon fragrance didn't come out as much either. Booooooooo... I'm sticking to my old chiffon recipe.

Cranberry Yogurt Chiffon Cake (modified from Junko Fukuda's Chiffon Cake Book)

Ingredients:
5 egg yolks
40g caster sugar
61g canola oil
2 tsp fresh lemon juice
130g plain yogurt
130g cake flour, sifted twice

6 egg whites (weighed mine to be 258g)
90g caster sugar

95g dried cranberries, coated in plain flour

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 180°C
2. Whisk together yolks, caster sugar and canola oil until sugar is completed dissolved and mixture is pale yellow and sticky
3. Add lemon juice and yogurt into yolk mixture and mix well
4. Add flour and combine well. Set aside for later use.
5. Beat egg whites until frothy and gradually add in sugar and whip till stiff peaks
8. Add one third of the meringue into yolk mixture and fold in lightly
9. Pour in rest of the yolk mixture and fold until well combined
10. Add in flour coated cranberries into batter and gently fold until berries are just evenly scattered throughout the batter
11. Pour the batter into a 20-cm chiffon tin and bake for 40 mins
12. Invert the chiffon tin on a wire rack and let it cool for 2h before releasing the cake for serving

Cranberry Shortbread

Cranberry Shortbread is Christmas food!! But doesn't stop me from making them early in the year. Started off as a practice recipe in anticipation for Christmas gift giving for my colleagues in December. Ended up being my mom's favorite snack. Don't think she's too crazy about the shortbread, more of the fact that she can chew on the cranberries. "More cranberries!", she demanded. She finished my first batch all by herself. This is the second time I'm making them, think most of them will end up in her tummy as well, heh.

I like this recipe because it has no egg, so I need not make a big batch of them to meet the ratio. The tanginess of cranberry is pretty distinct, accompanied by buttery shortbread with a hint of vanilla. You can add orange zest if you like as well, to add onto that tangy flavor. Shortbread generally looks paler than cookies. If you like them to be browner, you can bake them slightly longer, but do bear in mind your shortbread may turn out drier and harder.

Cranberry Shortbread

Ingredients
115g all purpose flour
75g unsalted butter
35g white sugar
50g dried cranberries, chopped
1 tsp vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

Method
1. Preheat oven to 180°C
2. Cream butter and sugar
3. Add vanilla extract and mix well
4. Mix flour and salt in another bowl
5. Blend flour mixture into butter and sugar mixture to form a dough
6. Add the cranberries in and mix thoroughly
7. Wrap the dough and refrigerate for 1h (I skipped this, resulting in really soft dough that is hard to handle)
8. Roll out dough to desired thickness and use a cookie cutter to cut out the dough
9. Bake for 8 - 10 mins and and transfer to wire rack to cool. Proffiiitttt!!!