Mini muffins – so much better and more ridiculous than regular muffins!

As far as I’m concerned, Christmas equals baking season. My grandmother always made a hundred different kinds of cookies for Christmas and I’ve started doing the same since she passed away. However, my winter baking is not only limited to cookies and, since I recently got a mini muffin baking tray, I just had to share my new recipe invention: vanilla cardamom mini muffins with lingonberry jam.

Now, obviously lingonberry jam is a rather obscure ingredient, and I only had some because I used to live in Sweden and sometimes buy it in Ikea now. Lingonberry tastes a lot like cranberry, so the main point here is that its tart flavour balances out the sweetness of vanilla and cardamom. If you’re into that, you can also use red currant or cranberry or any other kind of tart jam to replace the lingonberry. If you like your muffins extra cosy and sweet though, I would suggest using apple jam, because apples and cardamom go together quite well.

Like with all my recipes, you’re welcome to experiment and skip the jam altogether, because it produces a nice, slightly exotic basic mini muffin. I’ve tried to make the recipe a bit modular, so you’ll see that I added the jam as optional at the end.

Vanilla cardamom mini muffins recipe

Ingredients

• 160 g (1 1/4 cup) plain/white flour
• 60 g (1/3 cup) sugar
• 1 egg
• 110 ml (a bit less than 1/2 cup) milk/plant milk (I used milk)
• 75 g (1/3 cup) butter
• 1.5 teaspoon baking powder
• a pinch of salt
• 2-3 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1.5 teaspoon ground cardamom
• OPTIONAL: lingonberry/cranberry/red currant jam for tart flavours or apple jam for extra sweetness

Prep time: 15 – 20 minutes

Baking time: 10 minutes

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 175 °C (350 °F). Melt and cool the butter.

Whisk the egg, milk, sugar, vanilla extract and butter together with a hand mixer or an old school whisk until well combined.

Add flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom and mix well.

Fill the mini muffin cups in your baking tray. If you’re planning to use jam, start with 1 teaspoon of batter on the bottom of the tray, add about 1/3 teaspoon of jam and cover the jam with another teaspoon of batter per muffin, so the jam doesn’t leak out on the sides.

Bake for about 10 minutes or until the batter is no longer runny. Enjoy!

Notes

This recipe makes about 2 mini muffin baking trays, which is 48 mini muffins with 2 inch/5 cm diameter. Don’t fret if you don’t have a mini muffin tray though, you can still use it to make normal-sized muffins, just double the ingredients and bake for 20 – 25 minutes.

I love the exotic taste of cardamom, particularly during winter, but if you’re not a fan, you could skip it altogether and just use this recipe for normal, jam-filled muffins. As long as you have a good base recipe, the possibilities are endless and you can play around it with different ingredients as much as you want.

These muffins go great with cocoa or hot chocolate and if you do make the mini version, I promise you they won’t last the day. Somehow it’s just that much more fun to eat bite-sized muffins than regular muffins that they just fly off the plate. Do you agree?