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.

Our First Atempt At Piping A Cupcake

My Brother and I piped some cupcakes recently. It was really fun! We tried two tips: They are called "1m" and "4b", a.k.a the star and shell tips.

That's A Fact, Jack!

I have your Jack update. (It is hot off the press)

Jack went to the veterinarian this morning, as a check up and to have another heartworm test. Guess what? Jack is heartworm negative!

This means that it's time to start finding him his adopter!

Holiday Cookies!

Happy New Year!
I am sharing the cookies that we made this holiday season and there will be a recipe link with each one, but be warned that it may or may not be the one we used... But I will try to publish the one closest to what we baked!

Turtles

 These are so tasty and easy to make. Some people think that they are called turtles because they kind of look like turtles, but I think it is because they taste like the turtle topping on pies, cakes and other sweets... It could be a combination of the both :-)

Buckeyes

 These are also delicious... they are what I would imagine Bon Bons dipped in chocolate would taste like. Only they are a bit more peanut butter-y! These were a bit tricky to dip in chocolate. In the end what worked best was using a fork to dip them instead of a tooth pick, but I am pretty sure it's whatever works for you.

Chocolate cupcakes with ganache

This one was probably my favorite. It's a chocolate cupcake with ganache in it. You make the ganache and put it in the fridge and let it set. Then you make the chocolate cupcake batter, pour about half in, then roll the some of the ganache (which in it's cold state is called truffle) into a ball to about the size of a buckeye, plop it in the cupcake and cover it the rest of the way with more cupcake batter. Next, bake it like a regular cupcake. The topping for this already magnificent cupcake is a nice raspberry frosting.

And with the extra cold ganache, we made Truffles!

We had a similar problem as we did with the buckeyes (hard to dip!)...these are the prettiest two.

Sugar cookies and icing

 

These were probably the most fun to make, I really enjoyed decorating them (I think my brother did too!) For the record, these taste pretty great too.

  Milk chocolate cookies
 We also made these... I won't go into great detail because these are in two other blog posts of mine (can you tell they are a favorite?)

Meringues 
It amazes me how light these are! They've been dehydrated by the oven, yet they are not dry tasting (you know, when you need water or milk after you eat something... that is my general description of dry). These are little wonders :-)

Chocolate No Bake Cookies
Finally...we have no bake cookies. They are peanut butter, oatmeal and chocolate... they kinda taste like a oat-y Reese's cup, just with a touch more chocolate.

 Hope you have a great new year!