Tangerine Ginger Poppy Seed Jumbo Muffins
Ingredients
for the batter:
- zest of two tangerines
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 1/4 cups flour
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- Pinch salt
- 1/2 cup canola oil
- juice of two tangerines about 2/3 cup
- 2 eggs
- 2/3 cup buttermilk
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/2 inch knob fresh ginger grated
- 1 tablespoon poppy seeds
for the glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 2-3 tablespoons tangerine juice
- Zest
- or sugar:
- 1/4 cup coarse sugar like demerara sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425. Line 6 wells in a jumbo muffin tin. Set aside.
- In a large bowl or bowl of a stand mixer and mix together the zest and sugar until well mixed and fragrant.
- In a second bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Add them to the sugar mixture in a steam as the mixer runs. A clumpy dough will form.
- Add the oil, juice, eggs, buttermilk and ginger. Mix until a fairly smooth batter forms. Stir in the poppy seeds.
- Fill each well about 3/4 of the way. Sprinkle with coarse sugar if using.
- Bake for 5 minutes then reduce heat to 375 and bake an additional 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean or with one or two coarse crumbs.
- Meanwhile, whisk together glaze ingredients, if using.
- Remove to wire rack and drizzle with glaze if using. Or use neither!
- Cool on wire rack.
We all know my love of the Stayman-Winesap apple but my second love is the tangerine. Strangely in the last ten years or so they’ve been difficult to find. I blame big Cutie and the take over the citrus aisle by easy peel clementines, tangelos and mandarins. While in the same family, tangerines have a tartness I enjoy.
I think the tangerine I used to get was the Dancy Tangerine but apparently they haven’t been sold commercially since around the time I stopped seeing tangerines in every store. Which tracks.
In hopes of getting the perfect fruit, I’ve ordered tangerines online and had them replaced by mandarins by the growers. I was refunded but still didn’t have tangerines. I’ve bought what is labeled as a “tangerine” at supermarkets only to get them home and see in small print they are actually tangelos.
This year I ordered an early growing variety, the Fallglo from a grove in Florida and they literally delivered. I don’t love them as much as the Dancy but they were pretty good, if a few were hard to peel. I don’t remember this issue with the Dancy! I’m hoping tangerines will fall back into fashion the way apple varieties have come and gone over more recent years.
It really was too many tangerines for two people so I used some to make these muffins and some in our pineapple-cranberry sauce this year at Thanksgiving. I don’t know why muffins are all I feel like baking the last year or so but here you go.
The muffins are sweet-tart and have that great poppy seed crunch. I froze half of the batch (without icing) and when I defrost them, I think I will make a fresh batch of icing for them even if I have to use oranges or worst, a clementine.
I know icing a muffin can be contentious for some reason, does it make it a cupcake? Why does everything have to be sweet? Blah, blah. There is a very good reason why so many, particularly citrus-based muffins have an icing or a glaze. You get a lot of fruit flavor from the zest in the icing. Although I know it is tempting, I highly recommend not skipping it, citrus has a tendency to “bake out” in baked goods making it less flavorful (I cannot find rhyme or reason for this because it has happened to me in two different batches of baked goods made from the same bag of fruit) so if the flavor fades in the muffin, you can still get that flavor in the uncooked icing.
My other tip is to really mix the zest and sugar together well. It feels like a step you can skip but you really can’t, it gets those citrus oils into the sugar and then the whole muffin and is your best bet to get a really flavorful citrus muffin.
You want that white sugar to turn orange.
