Oranges and chocolate go together like nothing else. It seems a natural combination that is prone to succeed. Making these muffins is really easy as well, you won’t even need a mixer, just a good whisk. Also, it’s a nice fresh combination because citrus fruits are always adding a little kick to everything.
Interestingly, my family thought of them not as muffins but rather as cupcakes. I assume it has something to do with the texture, it’s more cake like than muffin like. That could be connected to the use of buttermilk, which gives the batter a light and fluffy texture which is translated into a cake like muffin after baking. Nevertheless, there were a hit, except with my niece, she doesn’t like oranges in her muffins/cupcakes/dessert. (She is also 4 years old so my heart is not really braking over that one.)
Ingredients:
– 1 orange
– 125ml orange juice from the orange
– 200g flour
– 2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
– dash of salt
– 4 tbsp. chocolate chips (preferably dark chocolate)
– 1 egg
– 125g sugar
– 80ml oil
– 100ml buttermilk
Start with making orange zest, after that, cut the orange in half and squeeze the orange juice. You should have about 125ml. Set aside and combine flour, baking powder, salt, chocolate chips and orange zest in a separate bowl. In another bowl, beat the egg lightly, add the sugar and combine. Then add the oil, buttermilk and orange juice, beating well in between each addition. Finally, mix the dry ingredients into the liquid and whisk well.
Make sure you are not over mixing, the batter should be light and fluffy. Take your prepared muffin pan (either line with paper cups or grease with butter and dust with flour) and fill each up to 3/4.
Tip 1: I found that the batter makes more that 12 muffins, so either you fill up to the top or you make some extras. I have silicon muffin forms and they are quite useful for that.
Bake at 200°C for about 20 min or until a skewer comes out clean and they are golden-brown. Take them out of the oven and let them sit for about 5 min before you remove the muffins from the pan. Let cool completely before you decorate them.
Tip 2: Because you are baking orange zest it will have a particular smell when you remove the muffins from the oven. At first, I was worried that the muffins won’t taste good but it was fine. There is something about baking zest …
To decorate:
You can either mix some orange juice with icing sugar and sprinkle chocolate on top. Or you can drizzle some melted chocolate over them. I did not decorate them because I had no time and there were good as that too.
Considering they were almost cupcake like you might want to add an icing. Simple icing would be butter cream, mixing butter with icing sugar and maybe add some orange liquor or orange juice.
Happy baking!
Baking in Saskatoon 