Cranberry Orange Muffins

Ah! Cranberry and orange... one of the best combinations created, right up there with peanut butter and jelly.

This recipe calls for 2 cups flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 tbsp orange zest,  3/4 cup orange juice, 1 cup dried cranberries, 1/4 vegetable oil, 1 egg and coarse raw sugar.

Cranberries and orange juice

The first order of business is to combine the orange juice and cranberries in a sauce pan and heat (on medium heat) for 5 minutes. This will re-hydrate the cranberries. When that's going on it would be a good time to zest the orange.

Dry ingredients

Next, combine the wet ingredients in one bowl (cranberry orange concoction, egg and oil) and combine the dry in another bowl (flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, baking powder and orange zest). Mix well, then combine the wet into the dry... and mix more.

Then pour/plop the batter into the muffin tins, sprinkle a garnish of raw sugar on top of them, and bake them for about 17 minutes at 400 degrees.

My thoughts:
This muffin was dense... it wasn't muffin-like. Another thing we noticed was that the orange overpowered the cranberry. And it seemed like 1 tbsp was too much zest. So maybe that's why the orange was overpowering. Or maybe this recipe should use fresh cranberries instead of dried, since fresh cranberries are stronger than dried.
I am thinking of converting our favorite blueberry muffin recipe into a cranberry orange recipe... I'll let you know how that goes :-)
This recipe was a 3 out of 5.


I found the recipe here.