Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Mini Christmas Muffins


Mini Christmas Muffins
© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2009


The scent of christmas with cinnamon, cardamom and cloves combined with dried apricots, cranberries, currants and dried orange peelmake this mini muffins. Not as soft and moist as usual muffins are these treats great with a cup of coffee, tea or hot cacao on a cold winter day, for advent and during the holidays.

Mini Christmas Muffins
(depending on your mini muffin forms up to 40)
125g softened butter
100g sugar
2 eggs (medium size)
1 dash salt
200g all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1 teaspoon grounded cardamom seeds
1 knife point grounded cloves
120g dried fruit (I use dried apricots, dried cranberries, currants and dired orange peel)

Note: I always use fresh grounded cardamom and cloves, there flavor is much more intense. Especially for cardamom you need to take care, fresh cardamom can be overhelming. Then use less than 1 teaspoon. You will need around 10-12 green cardamom pods. Open them and ground the seeds only in a mortar. Also use fresh cloves and ground them. They are much better than cloves powder. I used cinnamon very often, so the cinnamon powder isn't getting old.

Cute the dried fruit into small pieces. Set aside. Mix flour and baking powder. Set aside. Preheat oven to 200°C. Prepare your mini muffin forms. I use paper forms and bake the muffins on a baking tray. To assure that the paper forms keep their form and shape, I put three little forms into each other. After baking you can remove the outer ones easily again.

Mix the softened butter, sugar, eggs and salt until creamy and foamy. Add the spices and mix until blended. Add the flour mixture and mix until just blended. Add the dried fruit, but leave some pieces to top the mufins later. Fold into the dough.

Fill the little muffin forms with the dough and put one or a few dried fruit pieces on top (I often use the dried orange peel only for this). Bake muffins until done. Baking time depends on size of your forms. For very little ones you need about 10 minutes for bigger ones a longer. Take out of oven when done and let cool on a cooling rack.

Before serving let it snow and dust them generousely with powder sugar. Enjoy!


Mini Christmas Muffins
© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2009

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Nothing says Christmas like dried fruit, cardamom and cloves. Lovely festive treats for the holiday season Thorsten.

Thorsten said...

Wizzy, you were fast. These little treats have all flavors of christmas.

Simones Kitchen said...

How lovely those look Thorsten and thanks for the tip on the grounding of the cloves. I need ground cloves in a recipe I am planning this week and I wasn't sure what would be better to use. How do you ground them? In a pestle and mortar or another way?

Thorsten said...

Simone, to ground small amounts of cloves I use mortar and pestle. That works pretty good.

MPG said...

These look super delicious...the dried fruit is so perfect...my easy way out of stollen ;) i'm bookmarking it.

Peter G | Souvlaki For The Soul said...

These are very "Christmassy"...love them Thorsten...the addition of the cardamom is wonderful!

Simones Kitchen said...

Thanks Thorsten. Will give it a go!

Sunitha said...

Awesome.. I made some fruit cake today.. and will be posting my recipe soon. You muffins looks great and I have never tried cardamom in my spice cakes.. sounds good!

Thorsten said...

MPG, now that you mentioned it, yes, the remind me a bit of Stollen. MAybe an easy way to get thetaste of it.

Peter, I like cardamom very much. So my muffins are always more on the cardamom side.

Nostalgia, drop me a note when your recipe is posted

natalie said...

these look nice and festive

Thorsten said...

Thanks Natalie.