Orange-Cranberry Muffins

This is Day One of my 'Purge the Freezer' campaign.  It's time to use those cranberries I bought on sale at Thanksgiving.  Oranges and cranberries are a nice combination, and luckily, I have oranges in my fridge. 

Muffins seemed to be the obvious choice, but finding a recipe lower in fat and carbs is more challenging.  After reading through quite a few of my recipe books, I figured my old reliable blueberry muffin recipe was a good place to start.  It doesn't use a lot of fat and the amount of sugar is relatively low too.  A trick I learned from my mother, many years ago, is to try reducing the amount of oil in a recipe by half.  This works especially well with muffins. Sometimes, replacing some of the fat with applesauce or banana works nicely as well.  Today, I doubled the amount of fruit instead and cut the oil back from a half cup to one and a half ounces.
(Ross)

Orange-Cranberry Muffins
1 Orange
1 Cup of Frozen Cranberries (thawed)

1 3/4 cups All Purpose Flour
3 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 tsp Nutmeg

1 Egg
1 1/2 oz Canola Oil
1 cup Skim Milk

• Place the cranberries in a bowl and mash them a little with a fork -- just enough to get their juice to come out.
• Zest the orange and add it to the cranberries.
• Peel the orange being careful to remove as much of the rind as possible.  Cut the orange into small pieces and combine it with the cranberries.
• Let this mixture sit for at least 30 minutes.
• In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar, and nutmeg.  I use a whisk to make sure this mixture is evenly blended.
• In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg and the canola oil.  To this, add the milk and whisk gently until all is evenly combined.
• Add the orange-cranberry mixture to the dry ingredients and stir until the fruit is evenly distributed.
• Pour the wet mixture into the dry+fruit mix and stir only until the batter is moistened.  Too much mixing at this stage will cause the muffins to be on the tough side.
• Place cupcake liners in a muffin pan (or grease the muffin cups with cooking spray).
• Spoon the batter into the muffin cups and bake at 375 for 20 minutes.
• Yields 12 largish muffins.

The orange-cranberry mixture.

The batter should look like this when it's ready for the pans.

 

Fresh out of the oven.