Carrot and Walnut Muffins / Muffin carote e noci

Another recipe that has been sitting in my waiting list, waiting for the right time to be published! I’ve been seeing so many muffin pictures around lately, it’s time to join in!

I know it’s horribly hot and that you might think baking is the silliest idea ever – well, for these babies it’s well worth it! And if you’re a baking addict like me, baking before the sun rises or at ridiculous times at night should not be a big issue 😉 That said, I don’t do either, I’d rather bake in the middle of the day and complain about the heat ^_^

Happy Sunday with delicious carrot and walnut muffins!

Ingredients

For the muffins:

225 ml sunflower oil

2 big eggs

100 gr caster sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

200 gr flour

270 gr grated carrots

80 gr shelled walnuts, chopped

1 tsp bicarb

1 tsp salt

For the icing:

150 gr quark

100 gr yoghurt

a teaspoon of caster sugar or honey

Beat the eggs with the sunflower oil and caster sugar until you get a nice and smooth mixture. Add the salt, the cinnamon, walnuts and carrots. Sift in the flour and mix it in until your mixture is lump free.  Preheat the oven to 170 degrees.

Mix the bicarb with a little bit of warm water and add it quickly to the muffin mixture.

Transfer the mixture into a muffin tray and bake for about 30 minutes or until the muffins pass the skewer test. Take them out of the oven, let them cool a bit and take them out of the tray.

To make the icing just mix the quark, yoghurt and sugar until the icing is nice and smooth.  Decorate the muffins when once they have completely cooled down.

On top of the icing you can add extra walnuts or candied carrot peel 🙂

For this last element I don’t have exact quantities, I think I just chucked 100 ml of water and 2 tbsp of caster sugar in a heavy based sauce pan over medium high heat, let the water reduce as much as possible and added the peel (really thin!) of 3 small carrots. I stirred a bit and that was that! Vibrant, pretty and delicious 🙂