Cranberry Muffins

My place now smells like lovely cranberry orange almond muffins, thanks to the recipe I tried this afternoon. Since I can't track down the source, I'll write it out. I think they turned out to be really delicious! 

Cranberry Muffins

1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour(if you can't find this, like I couldn't, use 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 regular flour)

1 cup flour

1 1/2 tsp. baking power

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

2 Tbsp butter, softened

2 Tbsp. canola oil

2/3 cup sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

3/4 cup orange juice

1 tsp. orange zest(I forgot to write this ingredient on my recipe card so I'm assuming it was orange zest and assuming this is a good amount. Just add whatever you want, there's no rules for zest!)

1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries, whole

3/4 cup sliced almonds, divided

1.) Preheat oven to 400 degrees for muffins, or 350 degrees for mini loaves or a loaf pan. Coat pan of choice or line muffin tin if doing muffins.

2.) Whisk together whole-wheat flour, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in bowl. Beat butter, oil. and sugar in a large mixing bowl with electric mixer until creamy and pale. Add egg, zest, and vanilla, and beat until smooth. Alternately fold in flour mixture and orange juice, making 3 additions of flour mixture and two additions of orange juice. Stir in cranberries and 1/2 cup almonds.

3.) Scoop batter into prepared pans. Smooth tops and sprinkle with remaining almonds. Bake muffins 18-22 minutes, large loaf 50-60 minutes, or mini loaves 35-45 minutes, or until golden brown and tests clean when you test it with a toothpick. Cool 5 minutes. Loosen edges, and turn out onto wire rack to cool completely.

Makes 12 muffins, 1 loaf, 3 mini loaves. Per muffin: 173 calories, 5 g fat, 2 g fiber

Here we have the dry ingredients mixed together. Good luck tracking down whole wheat pastry flour. I went to three grocery stores and ended up googling substitutes, which I included in the ingredient list.

The wet ingredients ready to mix. I actually didn't have quite enough orange juice so I just used water to make up the difference. It's still plenty flavorful. I also didn't know I needed the zest until it was too late for the orange so I just threw in some dry lemon peel I had, and I think it worked just fine.

The finished batter looks really amazing! It's pretty thick but it made 12 perfect muffins.

Ready for the oven. Pre-almonds on top.

Just out of the oven. The almonds toast on the top so you don't need to toast them ahead of time.

And the finished product. Pre-butter, of course! These were really good. The almond and cranberry come through really strongly and you'd never know there was no almond extract in the recipe! The texture is really god. I was very happy with these! Especially with the butter!

Muffins are generally a really easy type of recipe to make. They don't take too many steps and don't dirty too many dishes. This time of year we can finally get fresh cranberries. This is a great way to use some!