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CHRISTMAS MORNING MUFFINS

I have never quite understood how people can go in for vast, rich breakfasts on Christmas morning.  I am hardly a modest eater by anyone's standards, but even I can't quite accommodate a platterful of buttery scrambled eggs with smoked salmon before the gargantuan Christmas feast.  And I speak as cook and eater on this one. I do, however, see the need to make breakfast special in some way, and these muffins do that. What's more, if you measure out the dry ingredients the night before and put the muffin cases in the muffin tin, you don't need to do anything more labour intensive on Christmas morning itself than preheat your oven, whisk up a few runny ingredients in a jug and stir them into the waiting bowl.  Then dollop the batter into the prepared muffin cases and all's sweet - and smelling of cinnamony, orange-scented Christmas.  A last, heartfelt, note: Christmas, as I've said often, is about ritual and tradition; we inherit some, we invent others.  But even those we invent are not sacrosanct.  These muffins were my way, years back, of establishing a Christmas routine as a grown-up, and I have no desire to change things - essentially - now.  But I've improved the recipe, and give you its new, evolved form here.  In the kitchen, as in life, it is possible to play with tradition, without turning away from the past.

Recipe posted by webmistress

Ingredients

  • Express Recipe
  • Nigella Recipe
  • Vegetarian
  • 250g plain flour
  • 21/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 100g caster sugar
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • good grating of fresh nutmeg (or 1/4teaspoon ground nutmeg)
  • 2 clementines/satsumas approx.
  • 125ml full-fat milk
  • 75ml vegetable oil (or melted butter left to cool slightly)
  • 1 egg
  • 175g dried cranberries
  • FOR THE TOPPING: 3 teaspoons demerara sugar

Method

Serves: 12

Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Line a 12-bun muffin tin with muffin papers or (as I have here) silicone inserts.

Measure the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, caster sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg into a large bowl; grate the zest of the clementine/satsuma over, and combine. If you are doing this in advance, leave the zesting till Christmas morning.

Squeeze the juice of the clementines/satsumas into a measuring jug, and pour in the milk until it comes up to the 200ml mark.

Add the oil (or slightly cooled, melted butter) and egg, and lightly beat until just combined.

Pour this liquid mixture into the bowl of dried ingredients and stir until everything is more or less combined, remembering that a well-beaten mixture makes for heavy muffins: in other words a lumpy batter is a good thing here.

Fold in the cranberries, then spoon the batter into the muffin cases and sprinkle the demerara sugar on top.  Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, by which time the air should be thick with the promise of good things and the good things themselves golden brown and ready to be eaten, either plain or broken up and smeared, as you go, with unsalted butter and marmalade.

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