For those that celebrate it, I hope everyone enjoyed
their Easter holidays!
And as we say goodbye to Easter for another year, I decided to try something a bit different – Hot Cross Muffins. There have been a few recipes floating around online recently, but
I chose to adapt this one by Anna from FODMAP Journey.
The main differences from this recipe were that I used raw brown sugar
(because that was all I had), chocolate chips instead of dried fruit (because I
am a chocoholic – and dried fruit can be tricky for me), and piped on the white
chocolate crosses (for a bit of a different look). They also turned out to be more
like cupcakes, perhaps because my muffin tins were a bit bigger than what Anna
used – I used two tins of 12, which made 24 muffins/cupcakes in total.
Ingredients
225g butter, melted
200g raw brown sugar
150g almond meal
100g buckwheat flour
1 tsp mixed spice
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
3 whole eggs, whisked
140g milk chocolate chips
The rind of 2 oranges
3 tbsp orange juice
50g white chocolate
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 170°C, and line two muffin tins with paper muffin or cupcake cases.
- Whisk together the melted butter and brown sugar.
- In a separate bowl, combine the almond meal, buckwheat flour, salt, mixed spice and baking powder. Then, slowly add this mixture to the sugar and butter.
- Add the eggs, orange juice and rind and beat well with an electric hand mixer. Then, gently fold in the chocolate chips, making sure to leave lots of air in the mixture.
- Pour the mixture evenly into the muffin cases, and put in the oven for 30-40 minutes.
- Take out of the oven and allow to cool.
- Once cooled, slowly melt the white chocolate (careful that it doesn't burn!), and then pour it into a piping bag and pipe the crosses onto the muffins - be creative!
I found that these have an interesting mixture of spices,
chocolate and orange - almost like a Jaffa taste! They also go very nicely
with a dollop of cream! :)
