Cranberry & White Chocolate Mini Muffins
I offered samples of these muffins to those who attended the My Halal Kitchen Baking Demo for a Sunday school just a couple of days ago. I was demonstrating how versatile the batter for my Banana Blueberry Loaf can be just by substituting a few ingredients and changing up the presentation. The base is the same, so you can rest assured that you can pretty much have it any way you like.
Cranberry & White Chocolate Mini Muffins
Makes about 60 mini cupcakes (2 in. round)
Wet Ingredients
3 eggs
1 cup vanilla flavored yogurt or plain, full fat yogurt
1 cup vegetable, grapeseed oil, or flavorless oil.
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Dry Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 cups pure cane sugar, granulated
Additional Ingredients
1 cup white chocolate morsels with real cocoa butter
1 cup frozen cranberries
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350º.
- Measure all dry ingredients into a metal or glass mixing bowl. Set aside.
- In a separate mixing bowl, measure out the eggs and yogurt. Using a wire whisk, mix together well. Next, add the vegetable oil and whisk again until all three ingredients are well-blended.
- Using 1-2 cups at a time, add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Using a wooden spoon or heavy wire whisk, blend all ingredients until there are no lumps.
- Gently fold in the cranberries, then the white chocolate morsels.
- Using an ice cream scoop or rounded measuring spoon, add the batter to paper-lined muffin tins. Since these are small muffins, be sure to add no more than one cranberry per muffin.
- Bake for 30-33 minutes or until the tops of the cupcakes are light golden brown.
- Allow to cool. Frosting is optional.
For alternative and yummy frosting options, try using things like créme frâiche, mascarpone cheese, or Nutella.
These are great for breakfast, kid treats, or party desserts.
Do you have any sugar free recipes?
@Sarah- check out the question from @caraboska here in these comments and the subsequent reply I made. If you’re interested in honey as an alternative to sugar, these tips could be useful.
mmmm now this sounds like soemthing very yummy as well.
Question for you: how would I make a substitution of honey for that sugar happen? I mean, aside from treating the honey as a wet ingredient 🙂
@caraboska: what a great question!
Honey is sweeter than sugar and it’s also going to make this recipe quite moist. If the recipe calls for 1 cup sugar, you could actually substitute one cup honey. Generally, if a recipe calls for more than a cup of sugar, you would substitute slightly less- say 2/3 cup honey for every 1 cup sugar. It depends on how sweet you enjoy your baked goods.
When using honey, you’ll also need to reduce the baking temperature by about 25 degrees (it browns quickly) and you’ll also need to add 1 tsp. of baking soda to the dry ingredients to counter the acidity of the honey.
So, for this particular recipe: 1.) 1-1/3 cups honey, added to wet ingredients; 2) add 1 tsp. baking soda to dry ingredients; 3) reduce baking temp to 325 degrees
Enjoy!
Moist sounds good 🙂 What I’m mystified about right at the moment is that you mention one cup of sugar in your comment, and two cups in the recipe itself. ???
@caraboska- please see the edited reply.
Another thing: I only have a larger 6-muffin pan. I don’t recall the exact size of the compartments offhand, but I’m pretty sure it’s bigger than 2 inches. What would I do to the temperature (what temperature had you intended in your recipe, btw? I’m not seeing it…) and baking time to compensate for the increased muffin size?
I’m pretty much a beginner at baking – not counting the odd cake mix here and there, I’ve basically only done two ‘real’ projects in my life: once made baklava for my folks as a present (no, I didn’t make the dough myself – definitely not ready for something quite that ambitious 😉 ) and a raspberry pie with lattice work on top (Mom helped me a bit, just for the company, but made me do the crust myself because she doesn’t have the patience for it) and 7 cups of raspberries – the thing overflowed a bit into the oven, but it tasted great! Only God could have created something so wonderful as raspberries 😀
@caraboska:
Since I tested this recipe to be exactly for the mini muffins, I know that for my oven that time and temp works best. However, I don’t want you to be deterred- you can definitely transfer this batter to your larger 6-muffin pan.
Here’s what you can try:
1) Fill each muffin hole not more than 3/4 the way up.
2) Use the same baking temp (350 degrees, unless using honey) and keep an eye on them every 10 minutes or so.
3) The muffins may take up to 40 minutes or more to fully bake. What you can do to test their doneness is insert a very sharp knife to a muffin in the middle of the pan, much like you test a cake.
As long as you are watching them, I don’t see how they will burn. I’m sure you’ll do great. Let us know if you try this (which I hope you do) and how they turn out!
I love this recipe and especially cranberries.
@Taste of Beirut- thanks for visiting and for your compliment.
Can I substitute the all-purpose flour and baking powder for self-raising flour?…I seem to only have self-raising flour in my cupboard. Have you got any other muffin recipes using self-raising flour? Finally, I love this recipe and I think you are doing a great job with this site!
Yes you can, but you will then need to take out the salt and baking powder.