I'm really excited to share these next couple of posts with you. For my holiday break, I spend an amazing two weeks in Guatemala with a dear friend of mine, Sofia, and her wonderful family. Her mother and sister are fabulous cooks and as it turns out, her young daughter Belen is a budding baker. So to start out my good eats from Guatemala posts, I'm going to begin with the muffin-cupcakes that Belen and I made while I was there.
If you're wondering about the "muffin-cupcakes" thing, it's because they fall somewhere in between. I was going to shorten it to muffcakes or cupfins but neither of those names sounded particularly appealing. No matter what you call them they're going to be pretty delicious. The recipe makes 12 muffin-cupcakes but we made two batches since we were expecting guests that night.
Now the process we used in Guatemala to make these may be a little different from what I usually do, but you can certainly adapt to your own way of getting them done. :)
Citrus Muffin-Cupcakes
Magdalenas de Citricos
Step 1: Go to the garden and pull an orange, a lemon, and 2 limes from their respective trees.
Step 2: Make sure you have fresh eggs.
Step 3: Translate the recipe.
Step 4: Begin.
If you need to, you can skip Steps 1-3 and go straight to Step 4. If you can, it's best to use a kitchen scale for your measurements, but should work with standard measuring cups as well. We converted the recipe from grams and MLs as best we could. Good luck!
batter (la masa de pastel)
12 oz. (1-1/2 cups) flour, sifted
1 tsp. powdered yeast
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/8 tsp. salt
4 oz. (1/2 cup) sugar
2 medium eggs
9 oz. (1 cup + 1 tbsp.) plain yogurt
6 tbsp. sunflower oil
2 tsp. orange zest
2 tsp. lemon zest
2 tsp. lime zest
glaze (glace)
6 oz. (3/4 cup) powdered sugar may need to add more, but this is the measure to start out with
3 tsp. hot water
1 tsp. fresh lime juice
1/8 tsp. lemon extract can substitute fresh lemon juice instead
For the batter, in a large bowl, mix together the flour, yeast, baking soda, and salt. Add in the sugar and set aside.
In a smaller bowl, lightly beat together the eggs, yogurt, and oil.
Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the egg mixture. Combine the two until the batter is just moistened. Fold in 1 tsp. each of the citrus zests. The rest of the zest will be used for garnish.
Line a muffin-cupcake tin with paper baking cups. Divide the batter evenly between the 12 cups.
Bake at 400 degrees (F) for 20 minutes or until the muffin-cupcakes are golden brown and firm to the touch. Remove from oven.
Remove muffin-cupcakes from the tins and allow to cool completely to room temperature. Otherwise they will be too warm and make your glaze run.
For the glaze, blend together the powder sugar, hot water, lime juice and extract. Adjust ingredients as needed to suit your taste and to reach the desired consistency. You want the glaze to be thick enough to spread easily with a butter knife, but not so runny that it will immediately drip down the side of your muffin-cupcakes.
Frost each muffin-cupcake with a nice hearty coating of the glaze and garnish them with the citrus zest mix. Belen added an extra little dollop of the glaze on each to capture the zest because the glaze had already firmed up by the time it came to garnishing them.
NOTES
I realize that not everyone (including me stateside) will not have the luxury of popping out to the backyard for fresh fruit and fresh-from-the-hen eggs, but market-bought ingredients will work just fine, I promise.
For those who read Spanish and are wondering how we managed to translate the glaze recipe so poorly, we actually used a glaze from another recipe to complete our treats so it's not what's listed on the page in the photo above.
At Sofia's house, everyone wears hair nets or chef hats while they cook or bake as not to be adding any "extra" ingredients to the mix. While not necessarily flattering, they are effective.
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