Mini Orange & Cardamom Muffins

This weekend, I am co-hosting a Tiny Food Party with Bridges, Burgers & Beer, another Philly food blogger, using recipes from Teri Lyn Fisher and Jenny Park’s cookbook: Tiny Food Party. A bunch of the recipes we are making use mini muffin tins. I wanted to try out my new min muffin tins at least once before making food for the party, so I found this recipe for Mini Orange & Cardamom Muffins from a book I received last year and have used once before for a recipe (see it here) called 1 Mix, 100 Muffins.

The flavors of these muffins sounded absolutely delicious. It was a lot of prep though: you have to juice and zest the oranges for the recipe. It’s well worth it, the citrus-y flavor is perfect with the cardamom seeds.

Ingredients: (makes 48 mini muffins)

2 oranges

1/2 cup milk (maybe less)

6 whole green cardamom pods

2 cups all purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup sugar

2 large eggs

6 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

Begin by melting the butter over medium-low heat. Allow to cool.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line the mini muffin pans with paper liners.

Grate the rind from the oranges and juice the oranges.

Add the milk to the orange juice until you have 1 cup total of liquid. Add the orange rind.

Remove the seeds from the cardamom pods (I just cut into them and poured them out).

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl. Stir in the sugar and cardamom seeds.

Lightly beat the eggs in a separate bowl. Add the orange/milk mixture and the cooled butter.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until just combined.

Spoon the batter into the muffin pans (I used a coffee scoop to measure them out, it worked really well).

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until risen and golden brown. Allow the muffins to cool in the pan for 5 minutes then transfer to a wire rack.

So the original recipe said to bake these at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. When I did that they turned out quite dark and slightly burned on the bottoms. (in the photo above, they are the ones in the background)

Next batch I tried at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Not as browned but still too dark bottoms (that’s the one in the foreground of the above photo).  So I suggest trying 350 degrees instead, checking on them at 15 but probably baking for 20 minutes.

The muffins were wonderfully floral from the cardamom, which was balanced out by the citrus of the orange. I’m glad these were mini muffins, if not I’d probably consume at least 2 normal sized versions, I loved how they tasted!

I will have a post about the Tiny Food Party in the coming days so stay tuned!