Now, before you start complaining, these are dead easy. Just a bit of mixing and piping and it’s all done. The recipe comes from an Italian food magazine, La Cucina Italiana (The Italian Cuisine), which I buy when I go back home as it’s full of very interesting recipes and food news. The original recipe also asked to sprinkle the muffins with some dark chocolate, but as I was more after a savoury version of the dessert rather than a proper sweet muffins, I left that out. I would still serve this after your mains, as the whipped cream makes it sweet anyway – and the carrot batter, to be fair, is very much reminiscent of a miniature carrot cake. The quantities below make 12 muffins, but you can only see 10 in the picture below as my partner slyly decided to kill two even before I had the chance to ice them…
Ingredients
- 250g double cream
- 200g plain flour
- 200ml whole milk
- 200g carrots, peeled and finely grated
- 80g soft butter
- 60g caster sugar
- 15g icing sugar
- 2 eggs
- 3 amaretti biscuits, crushed
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp chilli powder
- pinch of cocoa
Method
- Grease and flour (I only used a cake release spray and it worked all right) a 12 muffin tin and heat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius.
- In a bowl, mix together the grated carrots, eggs, flour, bicarbonate of soda, milk, butter, crushed amaretti and caster sugar. Add a pinch of salt and mix that in too.
- Transfer the batter to a jug (I found this to be the easier way) and pour into the muffin holes, aiming at filling them for 2/3. Don’t overfill them as the batter will not be enough and you will end up with uneven muffins.
- Bake in the oven for about 25-30 minutes, until the muffins are ever so slightly coming away from sides and are well puffed up and golden.
- Take the muffins out of the oven, transfer the tin to a cooling rack, cover with a damp towel and let them cool completely.
- Using a round-bladed knife, release the muffins from the tin and take them out.
- In a bowl, whip the double cream with the cinnamon, cocoa and chilli powder until stiff.
- Transfer to a piping bag equipped with a star nozzle and pipe small swirls on top of the cold muffins. You can also dust them slightly with cocoa powder if you wish.
- Keep refrigerated if eating later and, once ready, leave at room temperature for about 15 minutes before serving.
Baking with Attitude 