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Tag Archives: breakfast

I make! Cinnamon streusel orange muffins

Another edition of trying to get rid of oranges.  This actually happened much more recently than the orange pound cake and I actually have a recipe!  Mostly because I used a single recipe and didn’t make a frankenrecipe for myself.

In my search for more orange flavored baked goods, I came across a recipe for cinnamon streusel orange muffins.  I thought that was an interesting combination.  I don’t often see cinnamon and orange together.  So, of course I tried it out.

WP_20170312_17_03_58_Rich_LIThey turned out pretty good.  Again, the orange flavor isn’t quite where I wanted it.  It was pretty faint.  It was more of an aftertaste…or after…flavor…after…scent?  Pretty subtle, not unpleasant, almost floral, but I really wanted the orange to be more prominent.  I had added zest to the batter along with the orange juice too.

The orange and cinnamon combination was rather nice.  I didn’t try and drown everything in cinnamon like I normally do.  So the cinnamon added a bit of sweetness and warmth to the flavor.  I rather liked it.  I think it would still work if the orange flavor were stronger.

What else…?  Oh, the texture was pretty good.  I like adding buttermilk (powder) to things.  Besides flavor, I think it improves texture.  Also, since this is a muffin recipe, it is pretty important not to overmix.  These muffins had a tender crumb and were a little springy in texture (a bit more than I would have expected in a muffin, but not unpleasant).

Muffins themselves were also pretty.  I like the crackly top of streusel and the swirl of cinnamon in the middle of the muffin.  I think the photo is from the first time I tried the muffins.  Subsequent batches had even cracklier tops.

If I were to make them again, I definitely would have to augment the orange flavor.  I saw that some people were trying orange juice concentrate.  I think that would definitely bring an “orange” flavor to the forefront, but I don’t particularly like the taste of orange juice concentrate.  Looks like another recipe in which I get to play with citrus oils.

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I make! Orange pound cake edition

The thing with having a backlog of baking posts, or at least baking projects that could be made into posts, is that if I don’t write about them or didn’t take notes during the baking process…I don’t really remember much about what I did when I actually write a post about it.  Like…this orange pound cake.

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I remember I wanted to make orange pound cake (or really just orange cake in general) because my dad left me with a bunch of oranges that I didn’t feel like eating.  I make lemon cakes a lot and I figured orange would work just as well.  So I tried it out.

I know I didn’t just replace lemons with oranges in my normal lemon pound cake recipe.  I think I combined a bunch of recipes into something I thought would work.  But unfortunately, I don’t seem to have links to the recipes I used, nor did I write down the recipe I ended up using.

Actually, I think I did.  But it probably would have been on a piece of scratch paper or the back of an envelope or something.  Which I probably threw away because I rarely label those recipes.  I probably came back to it later on and didn’t know what I was writing the recipe for and just tossed it.

Anyway, I remember the orange pound cake came out fine.  A bit sweeter than I would have liked and not quite as much orange flavor as I would have liked.  I used the rind of two oranges but I think it was getting lost in the sweetness of the oranges and the cake itself.  I do have citrus oils so I might try and augment the rind the next time I want to get rid of oranges via cake.  And maybe I’ll have a recipe to share next time.