Carrot and Ginger Muffins

I often have ideas for things to bake or cook a couple of months or weeks before I actually get round to trying them. More than once, another blogger had posted a recipe too similar to the one in my head, or recorded in photos but not yet turned into a blog post, for me to feel fully comfortable posting my recipe without feeling like I’m just copying them. A recent example of that started the process that ultimately led to these muffins. My original idea was peach muffins and I just had to buy some peaches prior to attempting them, when a recipe post for Peachy-keen Muffins appeared on the TastyKitchen blog. So I got creative, and rather than post another Peach Muffin recipe, particularly so soon after that one had been posted, I decided to try make Carrot and Peach Muffins. I thought they were pretty good, but J, my resident taster, did not think they were blog-worthy (something about wet bits of peach not being a good texture experience…). So I went back to the drawing board my wooden spoon, whisk and oven, and came up with these Carrot and Ginger Muffins. I’m not fully happy with them, largely, I think, because I over-baked them, and so the outsides came out a bit too dry. Unfortunately, though I’m too wrapped up in trying to finish my PhD to do more than brief playing around in the kitchen, and so these are coming to you without the further trials that I’d usually do to try improve the recipe. If you think of, or do, anything that improves them, I’d love to know! This recipe makes about 10 medium-sized muffins. All the cup measurements below were made using a 250 ml mug as equivalent to 1 cup. If you prefer a sweeter muffin than the recipe below provides, it should be okay to add a bit more sugar, though I’ve not tried doing so.

What you’ll need

2 1/2 cups self-raising flour

Pinch salt

4 tablespoons dark brown sugar

2 cups grated carrot

1 teaspoon dried ginger

1 cup orange juice

1 egg

1 1/2 tablespoons butter/margarine, melted

What to do:

1. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5 (190º C or 375º F).

2. Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl, and add the sugar, grated carrot and dried ginger, before mixing everything together thoroughly.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the orange juice, egg and melted butter/margarine.

4. Pour the liquid ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix together quickly with a wooden spoon.

5. Spoon the muffin mixture into a prepared muffin tin. If, like me, you don’t have any muffin cases and are too lazy to grease the tin, you can make your own cases using baking parchment. To do so, first cut out as many rectangles of baking parchment as you need muffin cases – my rectangles were about 14/15 by 19/20 cm. Then, one at a time, push a rectangle of paper down into a muffin hole in the tin with one hand, shaping it to the tin, whilst straightening and pulling up the sides with the other hand. Apologies for the pictures below – this is a two-handed job and, with a camera in one hand, I was one hand short. Hopefully they’ll still help to show what I mean.

  Unfortunately, no amount of photo editing can compensate for an out of focus photo…

6. Bake the muffins in the middle of the pre-heated oven for about half an hour, or until golden-brown on top.

7. When the muffins have baked, let them cool on a wire rack. I think they taste better when fully cool (they’re a bit squishy when hot), and they taste even better the day after you make them.