Zucchini Lime Muffins #MuffinMonday

Moist and delicious, these zucchini lime muffins are made with homegrown citrus from my garden in Cairo and sport a wonderful oaty crumble on top.

 

Here’s something I don’t think I have shared with you all before:  I have an alien fruit tree in my yard.   They are clearly of the citrus variety and smell just like oranges.  They are also perfectly spherical, just like oranges.  But the outsides are green.  

I thought they might change color, but so far, they have not.  They were mere flower buds on the tree when we moved here in January and I have been waiting nine long months for the fruit to be ready to pick.  

The problem is, how do you know when citrus is ready to pick?  Every so often I wander outside and give the lower ones a squeeze.  Surely when they are ripe and full of juice, they will soften up slightly, right?   Well, they sure haven’t yet. Not much anyway.  

When I received the email with this week’s Muffin Monday recipe, and it was a Zucchini Lemon Muffin, I decided it was time. Because I am tired of waiting. Nine months, people!  And if they taste like orange or lime, either way, they will make a good muffin. (And if they don’t taste good, I had some store bought limes for back up!)  

So I picked a couple and cut one open.  Despite the distinct smell of orange, the juice is sour and tastes like lime. I decided right there to add brown sugar to the mix because all that sourness would not be relieved by only syrup for sweetening. 

So I give you homegrown lime muffins with zucchini and brown sugar, with a brown sugar crumble topping.  And they were good.

Ingredients

For the muffin:

1/2 cup or 70g flour

1/4 cup or 25g ground almonds

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 cup or 20g traditional or rolled oats

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup dark brown sugar

1/4 cup or 60ml Lyle’s Golden Syrup

2 tablespoons lime zest (from 2 large limes - and one more for the topping)

2 tablespoons lime juice

1 egg

1/4 cup or 60ml canola oil

1/4 cup or 60ml yogurt

1/2 cup or 60g zucchini

For the topping:

1/4 cup oats

1/4 cup dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon COLD butter

Zest of one large lime

Method

Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a muffin tin with six liners or grease generously.  (The recipe made eight for me and you will see later how full I filled the cups.)

Combine the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, oats, salt and brown sugar in a medium bowl.  Stir and set aside.

Zest and juice your limes.  Make sure to strain out the seeds.

Put all the topping ingredients - cold butter, 1 tablespoon of lime zest, oats and brown sugar – into your food processor and give them a quick zip until they look like large crumbs.  Set aside.

Whisk together the syrup, the remaining lime zest, lime juice, 1 egg, canola oil and yogurt in a small bowl.  

Grate in the zucchini and stir.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, stirring just until combined.

Divide among six (or eight or 10 muffin) liners.  

Divide the crumble mix among the muffins.

Bake for 20 minutes or until golden.

Remove the muffins and place on a wire rack to cool.

Enjoy!

And just for fun, here's the hound playing with one of the green "balls" from our tree.  He has been wanting one since they became big enough for him to notice them hanging there. 

Exploratory sniff.

I'll have that!

Catching the ball mid-air.

Quick chew - not so tasty. 

The ball that bites back!

Pecan Golden Syrup Bundt Cake

My house has been full these last few weeks, filled with family and good times.  Of course, it has kept me busy but it is a joy to have more folks to feed.  Since I am always looking for new ideas, I am delighted to take part for the first time in Belleau Kitchen's Random Recipe Challenge.  

Here’s how the Random Recipe Challenge works:   Number your cookbooks and choose one randomly.  Or make a big pile of them and pick one out with your eyes closed.  Then make the first recipe on the first random page you open.   Since I belong to EatYourBooks,  this was very easy.  Right now I have 89 cookbooks registered (Don’t ask me how many aren’t yet!) so I asked my daughter to pick a number and she said 11.  I counted down and the 11^th book on my list is Nigella’s Kitchen.  One of my very favorite cookbooks!  The random page I opened to was her Pecan Maple Bundt Cake, which I had yet to make, so it was perfect.  I don’t have maple syrup in Cairo but thankfully the Random Recipe rules allow for substitutions for availability or dietary restriction.  So here goes.

Ingredients

For the pecan filling:

1 rounded 1/2 cup or 75g plain flour

2 rounded tablespoons or 30g soft unsalted butter

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup or 150g pecans (or walnuts) (I used pecans, of course.) 

125ml maple or golden syrup (I used Lyle’s Golden Syrup.)

For the cake:

2 1/2 cups or 310g flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda or bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 rounded 1/2 cup or 125g soft unsalted butter

Scant 3/4 cup or 160g sugar

2 eggs

1 cup or 250ml sour cream or crème fraîche

1–2 teaspoons confectioners' or icing sugar, for decoration

Method

Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C and grease your Bundt pan. 

First, make the filling.  Toast your pecans in a baking pan for about 10-15 minutes in the preheating oven.  Watch them carefully so they don’t scorched.  Chop the pecans roughly.

Mix the flour with the butter using a fork.  You want it to look like small crumbs.  

Stir in the cinnamon, chopped pecans and golden syrup.  This will be very thick, almost solid.   Set aside.

To make the cake batter, measure your dry cake ingredients into a small bowl: the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.  Mix well. 

Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl with beaters or in your standing mixer.   

Then beat in one tablespoon of the flour mixture, then one egg.  

Then add another tablespoonful of flour mixture followed by the second egg.

Add the rest of the flour mixture and beat while adding the sour cream.  The batter will be very thick.

Spoon just more than half of the cake batter around the Bundt pan.  Spread the batter up the sides so that you make a channel of sorts in the middle of the batter.  This is to avoid having the filling leak out while baking.

Use a tablespoon to fill the channel in the batter with your pecan filling. 

Cover with the remaining batter and smooth the top. 

Bake in the preheated oven for 30-40 minutes.   Check with a cake tester after 30 minutes.  Make sure to get the tester into the cake part because the filling will probably not come out clean, even when the cake is baked through.

Let the cake cool for 10-15 minutes and then loosen the sides with a small spatula or knife.  Turn the cake out.  

Cool completely and then decorate by sprinkling with icing or confectioners’ sugar.  This cake was gone in a heartbeat!  I think they even licked the plate. 

Enjoy!

If you would like to join the next challenge, follow Belleau Kitchen on Twitter or join the group on Facebook. 

Click on the graphic to see how other bloggers have met the challenge this month!

Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels

This is the chocolate that started me off.   

Almost two months ago I had the good fortune to be invited to Geneva to take part in a meeting of company spouses.  We were also treated to some lovely meals and excursions, one of which was the Cailler chocolate factory in Gruyère.    I’ve traveled all over the world, but somehow I had never come across chocolate with caramel and SALT. Ordinarily not a sweet lover, I ate the whole bar, square by square, nibble by nibble until it was completely gone. Then I mourned. Just as well, you say, and you are correct, but that new taste sensation has stayed at the back of my mind now for weeks.

Yesterday, I came across a recipe online, originally from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich and I knew I had to try it.

Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels
from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich (And if you, too, love Alice Medrich, check out her blog.) 

Ingredients
1 cup Lyle’s Golden Syrup
2 cups sugar (I used only 1 3/4 cups)
3/8 teaspoon fine sea salt (I used a 1/2 teaspoon since I was trying to approximate my Swiss experience, which was definitely salty.)
2 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 teaspoons pure ground vanilla beans, purchased or ground in a coffee or spice grinders, or 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (I scraped the seeds out of one fresh bean then threw the whole pod in while heating the cream, taking it out before adding the cream to the sugar mixture as required.)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into chunks, softened

Equipment
A 9-inch square baking pan
Candy thermometer

Line the bottom and sides of the baking pan with aluminum foil and grease the foil. (Really grease it well or even the foil will stick to this caramel! Mine did in places so clearly my greasing wasn’t thick enough everywhere.) Combine the golden syrup, sugar, and salt in a heavy 3-quart saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring with a silicone spatula or wooden spoon, until the mixture begins to simmer around the edges. Wash the sugar and syrup from the sides of the pan with a pastry brush dipped in water. Cover and cook for about 3 minutes. (Meanwhile, rinse the spatula or spoon before using it again later.) Uncover the pan and wash down the sides once more. Attach the candy thermometer to the pan, without letting it touch the bottom of the pan, and cook, uncovered (without stirring) until the mixture reaches 305°F. 

Meanwhile, combine the cream and ground vanilla beans (not the extract) in a small saucepan and heat until tiny bubbles form around the edges of the pan. Turn off the heat and cover the pan to keep the cream hot.

When the sugar mixture reaches 305°F, turn off the heat and stir in the butter chunks. Gradually stir in the hot cream; it will bubble up and steam dramatically, so be careful. 

Turn the burner back on and adjust it so that the mixture boils energetically but not violently  Stir until any thickened syrup at the bottom of the pan is dissolved and the mixture is smooth. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally, to about 245°F. (This part seemed to take forever. I had my fire rather low because I didn’t want the mixture to burn but it didn’t seem to go above 225 °F for the LONGEST time, so I raised the flame and the temperature finally began to climb.) Then cook, stirring constantly, to 260°F for soft, chewy caramels or 265°F; for firmer chewy caramels. (Took mine out at 260°F and they are soft and chewy and are a danger to dental fillings for sure!)

Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract, if using it. (I skipped this step since the whole pot was filled with little bitty vanilla seeds and that seemed like enough vanilla.) Pour the caramel into the lined pan. Let set for four to five hours, or overnight until firm.

Lift the pan liner from the pan and invert the sheet of caramel onto a sheet of parchment paper. Peel off the liner. Cut the caramels with an oiled knife. (This DID NOT work very well for me. My well-oiled knife still stuck to the caramels. My kitchen scissors were much more effective in cutting the caramel into squares.) 

Wrap each caramel individually in wax paper or cellophane.  (I used cling film, cutting off a wide strip and lining the squares up in the middle with an inch or two in between each one. I folded the cling film over from the top and then the bottom, pressing a finger down between each caramel. Then I cut the cling film where I had pressed my finger, to separate them.)

  

These caramels are delicious. If I would do anything different next time, it would be to add even more salt flakes to the top. I mashed a lot of them off as I was trying to separate the caramels into squares.

Enjoy!