Pop Pop Pop!

Poppy seeds are a great baking ingredient! Whether they are in cakes or muffins or sprinkled on top of bread buns, they give a great texture of crunch and POP! =D One of the items on my "invisible-in-my-head" to bake list was an orange and poppy seed cake. I had been looking up a few recipes but none that I really liked (most of them used heaps of butter). Then one day a friend of mine posted a pic of some orange and poppy seed muffins she had baked! they looked perfect and she told me they didn't use butter but oil! the recipe looked quite simple so I decided to give it a go =D

Orange and poppy seed muffins
Recipe adapted from Cooking for One

Finished product =D

Ingredients
2 cups plain flour
4 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup oil (I used canola oil but I'm sure vegetable or any other oil is fine)
1 cup milk
1 whole orange
1 tbs poppy seeds
1.  Preheat oven to 200oC. Lightly grease 12 hole muffin tin.
2. Place orange in pot of boiling water and boil for 15 minutes. Take orange out of water and place in another pot of boiling water for another 15 minutes. Take out orange and allow to cool down.
3. Place flour in a bowl. Stir in baking powder, poppy seeds and sugar.
4. Whisk oil, egg and milk gently in separate jug. 
5. Chop cooked orange into small pieces and use stick blender to blend orange. If you don't own a stick blender you can manually chop orange into smaller pieces (I was lazy so I did this =p)
6.Stir oil and milk mixture into dry mixture and add chopped orange. Do not overbeat or muffins will be tough.
7. Pour muffin mix into muffin pan. Bake for ~25 minutes or until skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Mmmm tastes best straight out of the oven ^_^

You can serve with cream cheese icing but they do taste quite nice just the way they are. If you don't have that big a sweet tooth, these muffins are just for you! not too sweet but lovely crunch of poppy seeds and orange flavour =)

cooling in muffin tin~

I am still looking for a good orange and poppy seed cake recipe so if you know any that you would like me to try out, just leave a comment ^__^ I'm happy to take any requests!!