All´s well that ends well...

No matter whose foodblog I read or what cookbook I check out, every time I’m confronted with lovely pictures of even nicer muffins. However, no matter what I do my frantic attempts never end up anywhere close to the pictures and my end product doesn’t even taste good. It’s come as far as my sister, Maaike, now refuses to taste what I have made for fear it will be another disappointment. And quite frankly, I can’t blame her as this has been an ongoing process. So simple and yet so hard!
But I don’t like to admit defeat, so this weekend I decided to give my muffin baking another go. I decided to do a muffin version of my carrot cake recipe, which has never failed me and is very dear to me because it reminds me of my first encounter with carrot cake at Harrie´s Pancakes, in Graskop, South Africa during a very special weekend. Got me hooked forever, mind you not only the carrot cake there, but also the pancakes, the best I ever had. If ever you travel the panoramic route in Mpumalanga, you must have a stop at Harrie´s!

I decided to slightly adjust the measurements to that of a muffin recipe book I have, so I would end up with plenty of batter and I also added a grated apple for some extra moisture as my previous experiments usually turned out dry.
And hooray!!! My carrot cake recipe must have done the trick!! The result was great, moist, sweet, but not too sweet, just fine. And since I’m somewhat biased, I took some to my parents and to friends we were visiting this weekend. Ohh, yes, I even got my sister to try one and the verdict: a great muffin. So maybe it’s not so hard after all.

Carrot Muffins

270 gr grated carrot
1 big apple pealed and grated
zest of one orange
50 gr of walnuts or pecans nuts, chopped
50 gr of raisins
280 gr of self raising flour
5 gr of baking powder
250 gr white sugar
a pinch of salt
180 ml of sunflower oil
50 gr of shredded unsweetened coconut
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
half a teaspoon of ground cloves
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

Preheat the oven at 180 degrees C and place a rack in the middle of the oven. I’m quite lazy when it comes to buttering my muffin trays, so I always use the paper cups. This time I used my small trays, which meant I can make about 24 small muffins, but I think it will make about 16 regular sized muffins.
With the muffins trays ready, I started on the carrots. First peal them and then grate them. Once that is done put them in a bowl and set aside. Peal the apple next and take out the core, then grate the apple too. You can put the apple in the bowl with the carrot. Zest the orange and add to the carrot apple mixture. I also sprinkled a little orange juice over the apple to make sure it wouldn’t go brown.
Then I chopped up the nuts, this time I only used walnuts, but you can also use a mixture of walnuts and pecans or just pecans. I put the nuts in a bowl different from the one that holds the carrots. Thos bowl is for our dry ingredients. So I also added the coconut and the raisins, the flour, baking powder, sugar, cinnamon, salt, and ground cloves and mixed everything up.
For the wet ingredients, in again another bowl, I whisked up the vanilla extract with the eggs and the oil. After which, I added the carrot and apple mixture to the wet ingredients. Once that is done, slowly fold in the mixture of dry ingredients until everything is wet.
Fill the muffin tray and put in the oven. Bake the muffins for about 20-25 minutes until golden brown. You know your muffins are ready when you can stick in a toothpick and it comes out clean.
Let the muffins cool a bit in the tray before taking them out. After about 10 minutes remove the muffins from the tray and let cool on a wire rack.
I personally like the muffins cold, but they are also very nice luke warm. The benefit of eating them totally cooled is that you can frost them.

Mascarpone and icing sugar frosting

one tub of mascarpone (250 ml)
175 gr icing sugar

Whisk the icing sugar into the mascarpone and frost the carrot muffins with the mixture. Sprinkle some chopped nuts on top if you have any left.